tv Key Capitol Hill Hearings CSPAN August 28, 2014 3:30am-5:31am EDT
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university of chicago. some of it was done in facilities specifically built for the government like a plutonium works on the columbia river in washington state near hanford, washington, a site to which we will return. let's turn now to events at the university of chicago. not very far from where we're sitting right here. let's turn to stag field. this is stag field in 1927. university of chicago played there. anybody know who the first person to win the heisman trophy was and where he went to school? obviously the answer is the university of chicago. jay ber wanger won the heisman at the university of chicago. the university of chicago is a founding member of the big ten football conference. they eventually -- here we see some action taking place out on
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stag field. the university of chicago is an interesting institution. i had the opportunity to spend some time there. the stadium fell into disrepair, and here you see a chart which shows the joseph regin stein library. imagine this if you can. they tore down their football stadium to build a library. true story. they also left the big ten in 1946. and it left room for another member to join the big ten to make up the full complement of ten. of course, in 1949, michigan state university was admitted to the big ten. so the university of chicago -- left, michigan state came in. they had a president who was known to observe, when i feel like exercising, i lie down until the feeling goes away. so they were not big into the intracollegiate sports scene. however, in 1942, they still
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were in the big ten and stag field still existed. it had squash courts under the stadium. and it was on those squash courts that an event transpired that truly changed the course of history. december 2nd, 1942. they had all kinds of bricks laid up there in the squash courts. this is a artist's depiction of the event. there were no photographers present. we don't have any photographs. fairme, very famous physicist was there, to see if they could have a self-sustained nuclear reaction. there were cadmium rods soaking up all the neutrons. they gradually pulled up the cadmium rods.
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have a self sustaining nuclear reaction. the code ward that was sent back to headquarters was, the italian navigator has landed in the new world. so under this -- under the stands of stag field at the university of chicago, found out we actually had the capacity to build, in theory, a nuclear bomb. the story then shifts. in order to build this bomb, we needed to get some really, really smart people, and it had to be done in secret. because we didn't know that germany was not going to be able to make a bomb. or japan. and so here in los alamos, new mexico, at an altitude of 7,500 feet north of albuquerque was gathered the greatest collection of nuclear physicists the world
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has ever seen. sometimes as many as eight noble laureates will be sitting around dining together in the dining room. it's incredibly isolated. they clicked on hot plates, because the wood stoves didn't work so well. they took these physicists from the radar research, they took them from all over the country. they were part of a system that cost them eventually about $2 billion. they worked in complete secrecy to develop a nuclear weapon, to develop what they thought would be a nuclear weapon. they weren't sure. and finally on july the 16th, 1945, at ground zero shown here in alma guardo, new mexico, the first nuclear bomb exploded. the question, what do we do now? this is a subject that's been debated a lot more now, i think, than it was then.
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president truman was president, and he had seen what happens -- what had happened in world war i. he wanted unconditional surrender from japan. the emperor wasn't much in the mood to negotiate. meanwhile, the u.s. military was working its way across the pacific ocean. in some pretty brutal battles. the iwo jima. four weeks, 30,000 casualties. okinawa, 12 weeks, 50,000 u.s. casualties, 90,000 japanese troops, 100,000 civilians. we thought this was going to be a rehearsal for invading japan. that if we invaded japan, that's what it was going to be like. we also weren't sure if the bomb would work consistently. it went off once. you could spend a whole course talking about the development of the atomic bomb. there were a lot of things that might not work. remember, germany had decided it wasn't going to work.
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so we weren't sure if we tried it again if it was going to work or not. in any event, the decision was made, and on august the 6th, 1945, the inola guy dropped an atomic bomb on hiroshima. there were 350,000 people alive hiroshima on the 5th of august. 140,000 of them were dead the next day. this is a picture of hiroshima after the bomb blast. of a colleague who grew up in tokyo shortly after the war, he was born shortly after the war. and he lived on the fourth floor of an apartment building. and he said you could see for miles, just to give you a sense of how much was wiped out. i mean, if you had been to tokyo, you know that the city is quite densely built now. but after the war, he said you could see for miles.
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on august 9th, we dropped another atomic bomb on nagasaki. the picture on top shows nagasaki before the bomb. the picture on the bottom shows nagasaki after the bomb. and the war came to an end. on the 50th anniversary of the bombing of hiroshima, the smithsonian institution attempted to do a display in which they would show thein hola gay, which is the airplane from which the bomb was dropped. and it was so politically charged and so politically sensitive that they eventually threw their hands up and said -- they wanted to have an interpretive exhibit. they wanted to have a discussion of what was going on. they wanted to put things in context. but whatever they tried ran into protests, and disruptions and objections. and they eventually said we just can't do it. and so they simply showed the
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plane with a very simple factual plaque and no other discussion. 50th anniversaries are usually the toughest. 25th anniversaries, everybody still agrees with the original intents. 100th anniversaries, nobody is left so there is nobody there who can complain who said i was there. 50th anniversaries are hard. this statue, by the way, was put up on the 25th anniversary of the first self-sustaining nuclear reaction. i used to walk past this on my way to school every day. it's more or less on the spot where this reaction took place. so what we have in a sense here is the triumph of big science. we spent $2 billion, and we had an atomic bomb. what should we do now? the war is over. what are we going to do about long-term control? after all, the bomb is based on the laws of nature, which are available to everybody. the united states proposed a
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comprehensive evaluation, on-site inspections to control all uranium deposits and then we would relinquish our arsenal and scientific information. the soviet union imposed an immediate ban. the united states said the soviets were asking the united states to give up their monopoly and make everything public before they agreed to comply. the u.s. said the soviets were being unreasonable, nothing happened, and the cold war started. the cold war is where a lot of the radiation experiments took place. some of them started in the second world war, most in the cold war. what was the cold war all about? europe was divided. now don't forget that the united states and the soviet union were allies. we were partners in the -- we were on the same side. no longer.
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tung took over china. we had only a hand of warheads and only a few long range missiles. and of course to no one's surprise in 1949, the soviet union obtained an atomic weapon. we got a hooij bomb in 1952, the soviets got a hydrogen bomb in 1953. we raced to develop more and more efficient ways of raining down destruction on each other. this is a titan 2 missile. this is the culmination that came along a little later. this missile, which you can see is no longer functional, there is a girder covering the outlet. this still -- this is the only one that still exists outside of tucson, arizona. this missile carried 600 times the destructive power of the bomb that landed on hiroshima. 600 times. there are three cities, wichita,
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little rock and tucson. each one of them had 18 different sites. people who ran this missile were sitting underground. they didn't know where the missile was targeting. they had keys, they each had to turn their keys simultaneously for the missile to be fired. b-52s went overhead. the idea here was mutual destruction. the idea here was, we've got overwhelming nuclear power and if you attack us, we'll attack you. kind of like if somebody said two scorpions in a bottle, each knowing if one stings the other they both die. and that's why i wanted you to watch dr. strange love. because dr. strange love, on the one hand, it's a comedic farce, black comedy,in one of stanley cubic's greatest movies ever.
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he had "clockwork orange", et cetera. but it really gives you a sense of what the cold war was like. it's not a coincidence that if you notice at the very beginning of the movie, there is a disclaimer that says this is fictional and the u.s. military says there is no way this could actually happen. but the notion of b-52 bombers being poised to take off and overfly russia and deliver unbelievable destruction was real. i don't think there really was a doom's day machine, but it was a doom's day scenario. i personally grew up in columbus, mississippi, which is the home of a strategic air command base. and i was there when the base was closed during the cuban missile crisis, as is depicted in "dr. strange love." they closed the base. and that's real. and people sat at the end of a runway ready to jump no a b-52 and go nuke everything.
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this is the war room, one of my favorite lines is "there's no fighting in the war room, gentlemen." what did you guys think of "strange love?" did you like it? glad you watched it? it's great. this is, of course, major tj king kong riding the bomb down. this is a role originally offered to john wayne, but he turned it down. well, this affected the way people lived. and, again, we're going to get to the experiments in a second. this is a manual for survival under atomic attack. if you happened to be bombed, don't rush right outside. don't take chances. this is a real -- illustration. if you're -- if the nuclear weapon is coming and you don't have anywhere to go, jump into a trench and cover yourself up with drying laundry. that will protect you from the heat. so people lived with this notion of what do we do if there is a nuclear attack?
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fallout shelters. shown here. and reflected in dr. strange love, of course, the idea there is people will go underground and survive forever. people had fallout shelters and they kept them stopped. and we had ethical discussions. i remember in high school, what do you do if you have only got enough food and water for one family and another family wants to come and jump into your fallout shelter? i think a more realistic question is, if a nuclear war really comes and you manage to get into your fallout shelter, just what do you think you're coming out to when you finally come out? the korean war. there were -- this was a cold war, but it was a very hot war in many very real sense. senses. we competed on many grounds. when sputnik went up in october 1957, it was a huge deal.
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the soviet union was supposed to be a backward state, we were supposed to be much better than them, and all of a sudden they launched a satellite. and every 90 minutes, that satellite was coming around the globe. and the next thing, they announced another satellite. and this one had a dog in it. and they sent back telemetry showing that the dog was still alive. and so we decided we're going to launch a satellite too. and on december the 6th, we tried to launch a satellite from cape canaveral, only it didn't work. so we're in this conflict with the soviet union. it's not entirely clear that we're winning. finally, the last part of the cold w cold war ethos i want to mention is the cuban missile crisis which comes along in 1962. as you may recall, the united states saw evidence of the soviet union putting missiles in cuba, just south of us. we said bring them out. we put a blockade around cuba. and we danced around the question of nuclear war for some time until eventually a deal was struck and we did not have a
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nuclear war. so i don't want to talk about specific experiments that went on once you have a sense of what life was like. but let me just pause. any questions thus far about the cold war, what life was like during the cold war? what the ethos was like? okay. we're going to talk about experiments. some of the things we're going to talk about are informed or not. were people told what the experiments were all about or not? we're going to talk about experiments done on patients. on children. on the general population. we are not going to touch on soldiers being used for radiation experiments. that's a fascinating topic. it's just -- we don't have time for that. it's a whole another topic. and we're going to talk about both the actual risk as we now understand it and what people understood then about the risk.
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but our story, we have to go back to los alamos. up in the mountains. people weren't sure they could get enough uranium 235, and so a guy named glen see boring, who is a native of michigan helped to derive a new element called plutonium. plutonium was named after the planet pluto. now, it should have been pollute yum, if you think about it. but he just liked the way plutonium sounded better. so that's why we call it plutonium. see boring went on to get the noble prize and chancellor at berkeley, very active in arms control later in his life. of now, what were the health effects of this plutonium thing? it didn't seem to penetrate the skin. but what about if you ingested it? what if the radioactive material was swallowed? we knew that was not good for you, because in the interwar period, there were women who were painting luminous dials on
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watches. if you have a glow in the dark watch in those days, it had radium on it, and so these women were paid to paint the dials on the watch. and they had very fine-grain brushes, and they would put the brush in their mouth to get the tip just exactly right and then they would paint the wash and swallow the radian and get a bunch of not so good diseases. so we knew that ingesting plutonium was probably dangerous. we knew what the characteristics were of radium but not of plutonium. so in 1944, in room d-119, a 23-year-old chemist by the name of don mastic, promising young graduate of berkeley, was working in los alamos with plutonium. like so many things in medicine, this started with a mistake. potentially pretty serious mistake. he got it in his mouth. he could taste the acidic taste
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of the plutonium. he tried to spit out everything he could. they called for help, and he swished his mouth out every 15 minutes. did it 12 times. they pumped his stomach, they trite to extract as much out as possible. this is very valuable stuff. this is all the plutonium in the world. we're trying to build an atomic bomb and the stuff we could extract from his stomach may be what we need for the bomb. he didn't seem to have any horrible ill effects, except for many weeks thereafter, if he walked into a room and just blew across the room, the radiation counters would go nuts, go off the scale. but we knew that he wasn't going to be the first person to invest plutonium. and we didn't know what it did. we didn't know what the health effects were. so we started to do a series of experiments. not at los alamos where there really wasn't very much in the
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way of medical facilities. but at oak ridge, at rochester, at the university of chicago. and at others. first patient was at oak ridge. 53-year-old african-american man was a cement worker named ebb cade. he was in a car accident. he was injected with 4.7 micrograms of plutonium. he wasn't told that he was being injected. he wasn't told what it was. the remember, the very word plutonium was top secret. the fact that it existed was top secret. but we wanted to see what would happen and how it would be excreted. experiments went on to the university of chicago. first person was a 68-year-old man with an advanced cancer of the mouth and lung and the next was a 55-year-old woman with breast cancer. so here they were trying, it would appear, to pick patients who were likely to die.
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the third was a young man with hodgkin's. the last two got 95 micrograms. remember, the first guy got 4.7 micrograms. the last two got 95 micrograms. that's a whole lot more. and we learned that the ex creation was different. that the fecal ex creation rate was lower in humans than it was in animals. so that was useful information in trying to predict what would happen to people who ingested plutonium. again, it's unclear if the people who we injected with this plutonium were even told what they were being injected with. similar kinds of things happened at other institutions, as well. the massachusetts general hospital took patients with brain cancer. 11 patients with brain cancer, termnally ill, injected with uranium. one didn't actually have brain cancer. they thought he did. he actually had some bleeding into his brain.
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so all these experiments were done without getting consent, without informing patients in order that we could continue to build bombs and take care of the people who were helping to build these bombs. the last set of experiments -- i'll go into a little more detail, happened in cincinnati. between 1960 and 1972. so-called total body irradiation. or whole body irradiation. they were done in other places, as well, houston, baylor, memorial, and new york. the theory was, if you had con certify, we knew that radiation could be used to treat cancer. maybe irradiating your whole body. total body irradiation, would help slow the cancer. actually, we had some pretty good evidence at this point that it didn't work.
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for the cancer. but the department of defense was very interested in the effects of total body irradiation. because if there is a nuclear war, and people get irradiated, are they going to be able to function? will a pilot who is flying a plane be able to land the plane? will they be able to fight if there's -- will they be able to work? ironically, the people they wanted to do this experiment on were precisely the people who were least likely to derive any benefit from it. we knew that certain kinds of cancer were sensitive to radiation. so irradiating those patients might expect to help them. but then the side effects of the radiation would be the side effects of the cancer and the department of defense wasn't particularly interested in the effects of radiation on people with metastatic cancer.
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they wanted to know what the effects of cancer were on a healthy 23-year-old pilot. and that could be best studied by irradiating people whose cancers were not going to respond to the radiation. most of the patients who were irradiated were poor. most of the patients who were irradiated were african-american. all of them had cancer. some of them weren't all that sick. some of them were still ambulatory. some of them were still going to work. and the radiation had some pretty serious effects. out of the 90 people who were irradiated, 21 of them were dead within a month. and here's what's -- the -- there are many things that are bothersome about this. we know when you irradiate
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people, you get side effects. you get nauseated. you get very nauseated. but the department of defense didn't want the patients to be given medicines to reduce the nausea, because they wanted to know what the effects would be without the medicines to reduce the nausea. as a matter of fact, they didn't even want the patients to be informed that nausea might be a side effect, because that might influence them to get nauseated. so these patients were not even given the basic medicines that were given to other people at the time. to help prevent the side effects of the irradiation. these experiments -- let's say ended in 1972. 1972 is the date you'll remember. of course, that's when the tuskegee experiments became public. that's when a lot of things happened. we'll move on in a second to radiation experiments on children. any questions about these radiation experiments?
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yes. >> was this before informed consent? >> the question is, was this before informed consent. >> that's a very good question. and it raises all sorts of issues. not to play word games, but the question is what is meant by informed consent. and the notion of informed consent as we now understand it hadn't really been fully articulated, although there is the court case of 1914 of schaumburg versus new york hospital, established a patient has the right to decide what happens to his or her own body. the memo that i showed you earlier for the terre haute gonorrhea experiment suggested in 1942, the head of the committee on medical research thought that something very much like informed consent was absolutely essential. clearly, that was not being followed here. we'll talk about sources in a little bit. but one of the questions is how
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do you know if somebody had informed consent? what we have in some of the physicians claimed they got informed consent. but there's not documentary evidence of it. there was a lawsuit, by the way, and as a result of this, a plaque now sits in the hospital in cincinnati. other questions. all right. the walter e. ferdinand school in boston. research funded by the national institutes of health, the atomic energy commission and quaker oats. this was an experiment on breakfast food. in which children were given breakfast food with radioactive iron and calcium to see how that food would be absorbed. the rationale for this was that quaker wanted to get a leg up on cream of wheat. they wanted to be able to show
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that their cereals were better absorbed and better spread throughout the body. i'm not making this up. how do they get them to do this? here's an excerpt from a letter. letter to parents, 1953. we have done some examinations in connection with the nutritional department of the massachusetts institute of technology. with the purpose of helping to improve the nutrition of our children. i want to point out that just like we saw if you'll remember in some of the letters in the tuskegee experiments, asking the men to come in for a spinal puncture, which you had up at the top of the letter the names of institutions like the tuskegee institute or the alabama state board of health. here, massachusetts institute of technology, a very well-respected, highly regarded boston institution. the blood samples are taken after one test meal, which consists of a special breakfast
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containing a certain amount of calcium. and if you sign up for this, you get to be a member of a science club. and if you're a member of the science club, you get additional privileges. you get a quart of milk daily. you get to go to a baseball game and to the beach and to some outside dinners. nothing in here that says we're going to give you radioactive tracers. all right. this raises all sorts of questions similar to the ones we talked about with the willow brook experiments. the willow brook experiments, by the way, i think i might not have mentioned, were also funded in part by the military, the armed forces were interested in a vaccine. and that's why they funded some of those experiments. this raises questions. first of all, can children give informed consent? are parents being coerced? if your child -- this was not i your child -- this was not a great institution by the way. this was not a place you really
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wanted to be. did parents really feel like they had any sort of choice? a quarter of milk a day may not seem like a big deal but if you don't have it is this too much coercion. it turns out that when you look at this critically the levels of raid craigs they got probably didn't hurt them at much or at all. nonetheless this raises questions about whether it is appropriate to do experiments on institutionalized children without informing either them for their parents. any questions about the fernal experiments? okay. will the's move to oregon. so this is the cold war and we're into radiation. the idea of nuclear power is
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very big. the hope is that we will soon have nuclear powered airplanes quite seriously being discussed. pilots who have flying nuclear powered airplanes will be exposed to a lot of rayiatidiat. who else, space flight. people who work with nuclear power. if there is a nuclear attack, people will be exposed to radiation what are they worried about? when they talk to potential crew members on nuclear planes they were especially concerned about what was as a euphemism refer to as the family jewels. testicles contain rapidly dividing cells. thus, if there's radiation exposure, those are cells that you would expect to be more likely to be hit by the
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radiation. this could produce chromosomal problems for you down the road. testicles also have the advantage in that they can more easily than some bod ilily orga can be irradiated without having to radiate the entire body. so in the washington state prisons between 1963 to 1973 there were experiments done to determine the radiation on testicles. these were healthy men who weren't going anywhere for a file. also a way for them to pay back to society for what they've done. the experiments in oregon were over seen by extremely prominent
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man. men were asked to lie on their stomach, testicles were placed in warm water so they would hang down and then they would be irradiat irradiated. this will be followed by biopsies and a veriesectomy. the recruitment was purely by word of mouth suggesting that they knew that the atomic energy commission who was sponsoring this research saw it as sensitive and didn't want it to be too public. there was a loose and informal psychiatric violation and a consultation with the chaplain. the chaplain was required to certify that the men in question were not roman kcatholic becaus if they were roman catholic they were not to have one. there was no benefit to these men in terms of their health. they did get money. they were paid .25 cents a day.
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$25 for a testic yule ar byulea vasectomy. if i'm reading your facial expressions correctly, i'm guessing the answer for you is no. so these were another set of radiation experiment that's went on in the prisons. they were stopped in 1970 because of changing environment. the administrators were concerned that prisoners could not fully consent. that's a valid concern. similar experiment wers were don the washington state penitentiary. it's interesting to think for a moment about the use of prisoners in human experimentation in general. the concerns about experimenting on prisoners in the 1940s and
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50s were not the same as the ones we might have today. the main concern was that they wouldn't be adequately punished. if you were in a medical experiment you get special privileges. you get to go to the hospital. you will get better food. it was confirmed in the american medical association as a legitimate way of doing experiments. by 1972 91% came from phase 1 drug trials. the experiments on prisoners were seen as being a privilege, perhaps not surprisingly tended to be more white than african prisoners. they were way out of touch with
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the entire rest of the world. the entrepreneidea is if you're you can't make a free choice about what you're doing. eventually prison experiments in the united states became n nonexiste nonexistent. prisoner experiments -- think question about the prisoner experiments. this is hanford, washington. it's a lovely town on the columbia river. it's remote and in 1942 it was the site for a plutonium factory.
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for many years it was the place where plutonium was made. it was picked for a couple of reasons. one, access for fresh water from the river. here is a billboard. don't talk. silence means security. another sign loose talk to chain reaction from espionage. this is how they advertise it. you're called tat soviet union exploded its first bomb in 1945. how did we know what they are doing? we know because radiation put in
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the atmosphere spreads all over the world and we can pick it up here. how do we interpret that? that's hard. we wanted to figure out what radiation is like when it was put in the atmosphere. how did you it come down? where did it come down? how detect it. what better way than to release radiation in hanford. they started releasing radioactive it in the atmosphere so they could study how, when, where it came down because this is top secret, they are not bothering to tell the people if the area that oh, by the way we'll be putting a lot of radiation into the atmosphere. there were problems.
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the weather wasn't what they expected or desired. they got more exposure at localites. we hoe that cows drinking from contaminat contaminated pastures to see how the radiation spread around. they did so with considerable secre secrecy. they pretended to be anal specialists from the department of agriculture to check tit. this is in your backyard in the united states. you've got somebody working for the atomic energy commission wanting to check in your house. it's unclear how much damage was actually done. how many people were actually injured. it's also clear that there was
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probably more radiation released from the normal operations of the plants from 1944 to 1947 they released radiation by another it you see surrounded by fu fuel and if we were in any kind of danger our government would let us know right away. you're also now using the entire population as your experiment subjects. this was done in a number of places not only hanford. there were nuclear explosions released to the atmosphere that impacted holy sites for the
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peblo indians who live in very close relation to the land obviously done in the south west. there was some concern and some observations that the spannic a, spanish and native-americans tended to be more often down stream in the releases than the others. before i transition to how we know about this and how these experiments came to life, how questions about the experiments? how many of you knew about these experiments before this lass? word of mouth or reading about them. >> word of mouth. >> word of mouth. >> in another history class. >> okay. >> how do we know about this. >> if they were top secret and they were top secret. there were early reports and rumors that some americans had been injected with plutonium. a congressional report in 1986
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was called america's nuclear guinea pigs. written in brand congressional la language. a journalist wrote about the story and got names and faces. i mentioned a few people here. she wrote some incredible stories and has a wonderful book out called the plutonium files. but really we started to find out a lot more about these with the book that came out of a commission. this was the rather thick book fro. it was created in january of
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1994. president bill clinton ordered all federal agencies and a ton of tough was declassified. those documents are now publically available. lots of pep have got to them and written about them . he wethey were en, people wonded what was going on. they held lots of hearings. there were lots of groups of people who felt aggrieved.
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veterans, convicted, mothers. people in the wrong place at the wrong time. they gaple with attention of how do you make judgments and differentiate between wrngness of actions. it's one thing to know. they were asked to decide who should receive monetary damages. who deserves money for this that the government ought to pay. they came up with a fairly short list. they were criticized for that. the report was released and president clinton apologized on october the 3rd. also on october the 3rd, 1995, the jury came down with the verdict in the oj simpson trial.
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so it's an example of bam release the report. now this is a wonderful book. really a tremendous report. you may have noticed that some of what i'm telling you magt not be as crystal clear and that is because many of the records what happened are incomplete. we just don't know. some are contradictory. some things we don't have protocols for. you asked about informed consent. we don't know. many because it was being done in war time. maybe because it was top secret maybe because nobody bothered to write it down.
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maybe because what we're doing here and maybe we need to lose these records. thi i think the committee did as pch as they possibly could about feigneding out about this. afundamental a afundamental argument is how do we assess what happened in the past. a lot of the concepts of informed consent were not well articulated. it's not fair to go back and say well, we didn't do things the way they done them. the committee did come up with a method of making retrospecti ir. there are certain ethical
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principals that stand the test of tame and place. all of those are then they heed doct doctor. the problem here is that if the policies are secret, how do you know about them? huh? finally, they said there are the rules of professional ethics that people need to pay attention to. they did conclude and i agree that it's not okay to just use people because they are dying. some of the rationale for some of the plutonium experiments and radiation experiments and other injections was that these people are dying and we mine as well get information from them. being ill and hospitalized did not justify that.
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you still have to respect them as people. so what are key lesson from the radiation experiments. i've only scratched the surface. i hope you will good and read more about them it. jonathan moreno has a wonderful book on it. one of the lessons is the medicine and the request for knowledge has to be looked at it the in a specific political, economic, social context. these radiations experiments started in the context of a cold war and ended up in aer which with a care with the fear that
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these weapons could be used against us. nonetheless some of the features that koim out of tcame out of t experiments. the idea if you wanted to do a big project you could get government funding it do big pro oe cots. even smaller studies that go against several hospitals. people got used to the idea that they ought to be funded it do researches are built on this notion that people doing science and medicine should get the funding they need to do the research. one of the casualties of these experiments is trust. even if nobody got hurt there
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aren't very many people who think for example that it's a good idea to give children radioactive oatmeal without telling everybody or to release radiation from a plutonium plant to see what happens. even if at the end of the day, nobody got hurt. i think it impedes. what i tried to do was give you results of the radiation experiments and what happened. we got just a few minutes. let me see if there are any questions or comments. okay. well thank you all for your attention and we'll see you on monday at the medical science two, the instructions will be sent in a message. thank you very much.
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[ applause [ applause ] thursday night in prime time on american history tv, programs about music and u.s. history will start with author michael lesses who talked about how world war i changed american music. then musicians gram nash and staples discuss how music has been used as a catalyst for social change. later a look on feminism and the impact on popular music in the 1960s and 70s. this weekend on the cspan networks, friday night on cspan, native-american history and on saturday live all day coverage from the national book festival science pavilion. saturday evening from bbc scott land, a debate on their upcoming decision on whether to end their
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union within england. sunday, the chief justice of the circuit court of appeals, he shares his inprterpreting laws passed by congress. in depth with former congressman ron paul. all day live coverage of the festival and buy biography pavilio pavilions. on american history tv on csp an 3, a massive document about the 1969 apollo moon landing. and general sherman's atlanta campaign and the supreme court case bush versus gore. find our scheduling at
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cspan.org. or twitter use the #c 123 or e-mail us comments at cspan.org. join the cspan conversation, like us on facebook. follow us on twitter. >> next presidential historian jeffrey engel talks about the presidency of george hw hush and the end of the cold war. he is the director of presidential history at the southern methodist university. we'll also hear from the chief of staff for georgw h.w. bush. event hosted by the university of virginia's miller center. this is about two hours. >> this event we call the manuscript review. it was suggested by nelson about ten years ago. they said, you know, it's a great conference you need
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something to tie the room together. why don't you have a leading scholar present a manuscript in progress and really bring some of the leading scholars and practitioners who can critique that manuscript before it's too late. we've all been there, you know, where 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. well, today we do have one of the world's leading scholars, je jeff engel who i will say a word about. jeff is presenting his manuscript very much in progress and the title is when the world seemed new, georgw h.w. bush and the cold war's peaceful end. he's an associate professor of history and the director of the center for presidential history at southern methodist university.
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he's the author of numerous books, two of the most recent include into the desert, reflections on the gulf war and the fall of the berlin wall. the revolutionary legacy of 1989. we're really fortunate to have jeff with us. you will say a few words about his manuscript and he put a few chapters up on line. he said you really should get a practitioner and somebody who knows a thing or how it works. we're fortunate to have the right person in this case. that is andrew h.carr the chief of staff of george w. bush from january 2001 to april of 2006.
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an scoredaextraordinary long ter a chief of staff. he also has skpeexperience withh one. he was his deputy chief of staff and secretary of transportation for president george h.w. bush. he is currently the executive director in the office of the provost at texas a and 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 really should get a heeding scholar from scholar from another discipline. we have those scholars with us today as well. david farber is a profess yr or
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farber. is is the author of a plethora of books and articles. two of his most recent books is everybody ought to be risk. and the author of rise and fall of modern american conterservat. thank you for joining us today. melany mcallist islister whose associate professor of international affairs, media and public affairs and also chair of her department, american studies at george washington university. melany is the author of epic encounters, culture, media and the u.s. interest in the middle east since 1945. she's also the coeditor with marie griffith of religion and
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politics in the contemporary united states. i know you're watching this with at least several other people but i hope we're fulfilling our obligation to the dream panel for your idea of the manuscript review. without further ado, i will hand things over to jeff to take it away. >> thank you, brian. it's traditional at this particular moment to say how pleased the speaker is to be here. i have to admit last night was the nfl draft and i was fully expecting myself to be swinging my way to a new city at this point. there is round two and three to be coming up so i have hopes still. let me begin by thanking
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everyone here for this trendendous opportunity. it really is for me to get mome moment but also it's wonderful to be here because this is one of the institutions that is a model for how the academy and policy making can come together, work together and move forward together. after having founded a new center can i tell you how many times an idea or program came up and we said how does the miller center do it because they do it well. >> we ask the same question. >> so we should coordinate on that. let me also take a moment to thank the panel for tabing time probably more than was necessary. i will do two things in my brief
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commentary. i was toll not to speak f. the first thing i will do is give you a little bit of a discussion about what the book is about. the methodologies involved and tell you a little bit about georgw h.w. bush and the story it tries to tell. it tries to do several things. it is a study of foreign policy during the end of the cold war and also a group biography looking at georgw h.w. bush. i should mention whenever i mention bush, i am referring to 41. it's also a study of him and those around him. the collective biography of american decision making during
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this period. it also tries to situate american policy making within a broader international m erk leau. time and begun to discover that events that occurred were in this many ways not generated by the united states. the united states was reactive often times more than prescriptive during these times. one of the arguments i make is that this is really the essence of president bush's policy making and of his foreign policy as a whole was to be cautiously reactive. realistically reactive without being too overly skuexuberant foreign events. it's fortunate recall all that was done during the four years,
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the breaking of the soviet union itself which is something that not many anticipated months before. we also have things on the other side of the globe, tiananmen square which are ultimately met with violence and force. simultaneously we have a democratic invasion of panama. we also have the golf war. we have not just the merfurther difficulties in the middle east visa vie the kurds. looking at all of these events it's actually kwquite astoundin to think that all of them occurred within the same four year period. in fact i would make the argument that more occurred during bush's single term in office on the international
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scene than faced any president in history with the exception of fdr during world war ii. president bush and his staff adopt hipocratic method. markets were on the rise. the soviet union and communism was clearly on the decline. what would happen when the decline actually occurred was something that no one could put their finger on. bob gates who of course went onto become secretary of defense in later administrations was at this point in time deputy national security advisor and gates who had trained as a historian was fond of going around the white house and telling everybody he could that never in human history had a
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massive empire collapsed without a major war ensuing the consequently when people in the white house saw the soviet union beginning to collapse they feared the next step in that logical chain. t the administration thought to themselves how can we promote stability. how can we keep things that are already going in the right direction continuing to go in the right direction. without either speeding then up they might go off the rails or doing something that would stop the process of thing. time and again during this book i go back to a quote uttered by otto von bismarck who said the stream of time follows along. by plunging my hand into it i am merely doing my duty.
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i do not expect thereby to change its course. now bismarck is telling us here that the world is moving in a direction. policy makers might attempt to change things at the margins but they are never going to change the current. never going to change the flow. i think to myful somself that td was going in the right direction and that the only thing he was doing was to make sure continued on it aproper path along the way. an example of this, president bush was destroyed in the press during the initial afterimagine of the fall of the berlin wall, an aftermath which was covered on international television which people around the world saw celebrations in germany
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occur and occurred peacefullies. leslie stall halfway through the press conference said, you know mr. president you just don't seem excited. this is the culmination of the entire cold war effort. you don't seem excited. he responded in a very important way. he said well, i guess i'm not an excitable guy. that wasn't exactly why the truth of that conference he pointed out that one of the things about dine am tick change is that it's all moving and change the direction.
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he knew something that the other reporters did not which was that spent most of the previous nights and hours with thatcher and gorbachev who pleaded with him in the it do anything. the excitement in the cd would gt o get out. time and again president bush and his staff approached changes in europe by suggesting let us not go too far in celebrating those who are democratizing from the streets up or celebrating reformers because the reformers have enemies.
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those enemies, ie, twhoez ahose are in control, have tanks and guns. the great fear of the administration was the communists would react. of course we actually see this coming true in august of 1991. so i argue that there are really only two moments therefore when president bush essentially took off the hipocratic gloves and decided to push forward with the initiative. the first was with the reunfication with germany. he believed the reunfication was
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necessary to keep future stability in europe. it allow the americans to stay the europe. he pushes hard for the unfication which theeded which kw was the end of the cold war. with see two things. we see the soviets coming along with the international community in a way we've never seen before. the soviets working with britain and france and the united states in particular about the security of the middle east but secondly the end of the cold war, this is a moment where president bush begins to lay out what the new world will look like once the
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war is over. there was nothing knew with bush's order, this idea that change was moving in america's direction. if we look at the tenants of the new world order, it was not so suggest that the world was going to be perfect but rather better. the words president bush used would be more just. more free. more secure. not just free and secure but more so. ultimately that the world world would be able to take up the opportunity that had been afforded before the cold war occurred back in 1945. i argue that his vision was one that roosevelt had created but never came to fruition because of the cold war.
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i want to thank my commentators once more and let them pilary me. thank you. [ applause ] >> i am an everyoning engineer called a practitioner but i have been blessed to be able to read jeff's manuscript and i found it very, very good. so i will start off by saying i think it was a bit mistitled because i think it's more of a biography than it is a description at the end of the cold war but i loved the information and is constructive to understanding what made
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geor georgw h.w. bush the man he is. i loved the trip dunn memory lane and i loved reading about the most respected men i ever met in politics which is georgw h.w. bush. i will also say the instructive part of the book is the relationships that the president developed over a long period of time especially the relationships with people who end up being in a position to help counsel him as he had to deal with phenomenal experiences. he discovered the value of wisdom but it was not wiz democrat that came from him. i think jeff has shown the collection of advisors who were
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helping bush -- a when many of these people entered that government, many long before bush became president, i didn't think they would have anticipated a day would come from the soviet union would implode. i think that was illustrative in how you develop the relations p relationships that become important me importantme important that american was functioning and not functioning at the same time as the president had to wrestle with a unbelievably fabulous opportunity. i do agree that he came at that opportunity with a design not to manage it but to invite the
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continuan continuance. it the ship headed in the right direction. i could have an emotional response that could cause it to turn the wrong way. i don't want that to happen. having said that i want to know where the shoals are. the hip is heading into the shoals, i'd like somebody to tell me if i can do that. po powell helped to bring experience that helped to make a difference. there were others as well. some the president didn't want to be around him at first.
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the views of the foreignlesy chun it was dealing with tit an that comes through in jeff's book, too. this is not something that only happened under president bush's tenure. the seeds of change actually were planted over seas by others and you wondered how well fertilized they would be or when they would be watered and whether it would produce beautiful flowers or whether it would produce seeds and were invited by our government and how our economy thrives but entrepreneurship and creativity and the courage to take risks and fail and fithose were thing
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that were lacking in the soviet union and he helped idea t. he did it by having the benefit of counsel of different people who didn't share the same view but the same commitment. i think that was great benefit to the president and is reflected in the early stages of the book. the challenge that i have that book has is maturing. i do feel as if i'm ank somxiou turn on the radio and listen to all harvey, the rest of the story. i want to know what the rest of
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the story is. i want set the rest of the story which is the relationship that and the debate that took place in washington d.c., especially europe when you consider that europe was trying to give itself the definition of an entity rather than b have the sovereign of the members. that was a strained period of time in the relationship between the british and french. wait a minute. it's always a strained relationsh relationship was strained as europe was just trying to give definition to its tfl. the french were demanding that their definition that also
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impacts some of the economic opportunity perceived by europe before it was perceived by the united states. i think there were other interests at play as the soviet union was struggling to deal with a reform that really wasn't invited. it was imposed. but it was invited, i think, for a noble reason and nobody expectation. however at time the united states was cynical of the person who presented the reform. is there a more mack mau reason
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him to do what he was doing. i think history has shown that it was more noble to do what he did. i'm sure makavelli guided who he is. some of the player are on the stage. they are looking for mack, makavelli. you look at what was happening in soviet union and russia. they seldomed called them russia at the time but there was an influence between raush ussia a soviet union. i'm going to go to the board
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meetings but george washington wasn't winning every battle but they lost barkle how my frietho of who the winner was going to be. in south carolina, they were looking to get on the other side of the perceived winner. i suspect a lot like that was happening in the soviet union. as gorbachev is wrestling with the reforms i wanted to put in place. obviously we know the coup attempt. that i think was an under
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current all of the time that gorbachev was bringing his view of reform to the people of the soviet union and to the countries and the satellite countries were definitely in my opinion trying to decide who's the winner? what side is going to be on. there's a dynamic there they think president bush managed better than historians acknowledged so he was cognizant of the east germans. the czechoslovakians and the balctic states who were trying to deal with an unsettled relationship that they had either liked or unliked but it was still who's the winner going to be? do they have the courage to make sure there is a winner or do they want to wait to see which one emerges.
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that was a tricky thing that they were increasingly sensitive experience and larry e's experience was helpful as you had to deal with these dynamics within the soviet extended family. i would say you have a great start and told the story of how president bush became grounded. i think you've developed a great understanding for us to know why the players were gathered to be around them and what their relevance was. i think you've given a pretty good description of how europe was starting to observe what was happening. i don't you've gone enough into the relationship and how nato
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was responding at nato. the bush team was a little more pessimistic as they made the change from a reagan philosophy to a bush philosophy which was not supposed to be a dramatic change. it was not but it was definitely a change. president bush, i think, benefitted by having been in the reagan administration and very much understanding of what their observations and expectations were and had the bif of people
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out and i think that dynamic is pretty interesting. i'm ready tore paul harvey's rest of the story. i want this to be productive. i would like to see the bush pub pi publick. president bush was truly rema remarkab remarkable. he also got the american misability act passed and a law to reduce ozone depleting gases and changes in how congress worked. got a budget deal done. he did it with one four year term. i think he was the most
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productive presideone term presn the history of our country. thank you. [ applause ] >> that's the proverbial tough act to follow. thanks so much brian and people for inviting me here and jeffrey giving me this opportunity it talk about his manuscript. jeff brings to this project an understanding of the relationship between the u.s. and soviet union in the 1990s. reading through this portion of the manuscript i felt quite confident that jeff knows. i learn a great deal about how extraordinary man faced a momentous service to his naying. valued he rarely articulated and
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perhaps felt no need to respond. bush is warm tr tray, as he cautiously and prudently oversaw the american government's response to the end of the soviet union. the restructuring of eastern our europe an the energetic leap of political into economic affairs. up front jeff explains that his project attempts to bring together three key narratives. one the arc of president bush's leadership and ending the cold war and the partnership between bush and gorbachev and a tail of the group of world leaders that played key roles in the unfolding of the years of the cold war. this is not the story of crowds which is how the story is often
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told because this is a ter stor leadership and regarding president bush and there are questions regarding bush's personality and character not only the presidential history. through interviews with president bush and several other key figures as well as an extraordinary scouring the white house and other archival materials, jeff does deliver a portrait of a famous man. his willingness to play the tortious to gorbachev's air what
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does not much appear in these pages is the bush that his critics saw. there's a bit of this criticism and of bush's ideological limits in chapter seven. one does not see hire the hift orrians. he lived in a world of economic success and based in entrepreneurial risk taking. bush i would think trusted certain kinds of men and certain kinds of knowledge and wisdom and had little or no interest in prospectives that did not fit the interventions he inherited. he counted on a world of international trade and accepted social hierarchies of all kinds.
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engel and the relatively few pages he devotes to explaining bush's political position calls his point of view moderate progressivism. what does that mean in a broad historical context? did bush leave in cooperation between international leaders, the bush and engel's work to some extent from a broader historical context no unproblemattized and undistracted. the rarely interrogated truths are unquestioned. bush is of course an individual and the bio graphical detate in
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his word but also the leader of a historical moment. those historical rather than b o biographical markers are largely unexplored here. jeff calls bush a company man. a largely unexplained term. it strikes me as misleadingly. bush is a leader not a middle manager. he works extraordinary patriot but his interest in using american power abroad but is reflected because president bush did not articulate these values. how can an energetic will to
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power and leadership dmienk str. at least sometimes i think jeff needs not take president bush at his word but instead to think about how his actions and policies demonstrate what push re bush really meant when he used freedom and how he saw the world and corporations and governments in achieving the society what he calls the exercise of free will unhampered by the state. i think jeff might take bush's character unvivid. the pocket of several of key's advisors. as far as i can tell, the cia, state department, state
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interacting with americans of all kinds. i do wonder what the patrician president made of his duties to the demos. he was charged of leading throughout the turmoil of the late 80s and 90s. finally i want to comment on what jeff calls international history. he spends a great number of pages not just writing about bush but how the per alittle nations of other states approach the cold war. a main reason the manuscript has different pages was that jeff gives his leaders long narratives of how the end of the cold war appeared to those nations and why their most dominate leader saw the world as they did. such pocket leaders and
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international per spespectives become the fashion in the writing of international and diplomatic history for a good reason. such histories make clear that the united states policy makers make the american position in the world both clear in the distinctions and similarities to other powers strong. at risk of being a contrarian, jeff almost never relates them to bush's understanding of the strategic environment that he must operate. rather than give leaders independent accounts of different nations and different ledders historian and
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n do that. jeff's parallel stories of the last year he's of the cold war 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 fewer pages on the historical trajectory of other nation states and more pages under the white house under his leader shn aship and bringing t wholcold war to end. many thanks to jeff and to the miller center for giving me the chance to read this. like andy, i can't wait to see the rest of this manuscript. thanks so much. [ applause ]
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