not to do anything because the great concern was this excitement in the crowd would get out of hand. that violence would ensue. that no one could control this incredible change that no one had foreseen. each of them had in the back of their minds a singular example of celebration going too far and being turned into violence by those who had thought it had gone too far which was, of course, tiananmen square which had happened only months before. time and again, president bush and his staff said to themselves and approached changes in eastern europe by suggesting, let us not go too far in celebrating those who are democratizing from the streets up. let's not celebrate those reformers because those reformers have enemies and those reformers, i.e., those in control of the communist state have tanks and have guns. and we can see what can happen when they get pushed too far. and ultimately the great fear of the administration was that those conservatives, if you

will, within the communist world would react to remove those like gorbachev who tried to push the world forward through with reform. and ultimately, we see this fear coming true in august of 1991 when there was a conservative coup, at that point without very likelihood of success. but nonetheless, the great fear that that could generate into civil war, ethnic violence and the like. so i argue that there are really two moments, therefore, when president bush essentially took off the hypocratic gloves, if you will. the first was with reunification of germany. he believed in a nato context it was necessary to keep future sta bill nit europe because having nato in europe allowed the americans to also stay in europe and he believed firmly the only thing that kept the peace since 1945 in europe was the american presence. therefore he pushed hard for

reunification an the terms he needed which was keeping germany in nato. and the second moment was the gulf war. when this strikes me as really the moment when we see the end of the cold war. why? because we see two things. first, we see the soviets coming along with the international community in a way they'd never done before. working with britain, france, on an essential issue to all of them. security in the middle east. but essentially the end of the cold war because this is a moment when president bush begins to lay out what becomes his new world order, what the world would look like after the cold war. it's the first time he's willing to admit the cold war is actually over. then we come to the final point which i'll make today which is, what the new world order came to mean. in many ways this is a phrase that has been deemed by historians and pundits at the time of being somewhat hollow, that there was nothing new within bush's new world order.

i think that messes with the idea that change is moving in america's direction. if we look at the tenets of the new world order, it's not to suggest the world was going to be perfect but rather better. the words president bush used, the words would be more just, more free, more secure, not just free and secure but more so. and ultimately that the world would be able to take up the opportunity which had been afforded it before the cold war even ghrd 1945. i argue that president bush's vision for the post cold war world was the world that roosevelt had created but had never come to fruition because of the cold war. with that i want to thank my co-speakers once more before they begin to pillary me. thank you.

>> my name is andy card, and i am an engineer by training, a politician by disease and not an academic. so -- and i'm barely called a practitioner, but i have been blessed to be able to be invited to read jeff's manuscript, and i found it very, very good. so i'll start off by saying i think it was a bit mistitled because i think it's more of a biography than it is the description of the end of the cold war and the challenges they faced, but i love the biographical information, and i do think it's 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 one of the most respected individuals i've met in my experience in government and politics, and that's george h.w. bush. i will also say that the

instructive part of the book is the relationships that jeff has shown that the president developed over a long period of time, especially the relationships with people who ended up being in a position to help counsel him as he had to deal with phenomenally 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. and so i think that is illustrative in what jeff has put together. he's shown that the collection of advisers that were helping president bush manage a process that really was not part of the political calculus when most of these people entered into government. and many of them entered into government long before

president bush became president. i don't think that they anticipated that the day that the soviet union wouldn't implode or change, but the wisdom that they had in understanding it, and dealing with it was invaluable. so i think that that was illustrative in how you developed the 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 america was functioning or not functioning at the same time as the president had to wrestle with an unbelievably fabulous opportunity. and i do agree that he came at that opportunity with a design not to manage it. but to invite its continuance. it was phenomenally restraining for any leader to say this is going in the right direction. i don't 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 don't want that to happen. having said that, i want to know where the shoals are. and 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 or left and see if we can avoid the shoals. i think that's -- that description really is personified with james a. baker iii, with brent scowcroft, for example, colin powell who helped to bring a breadth of experience and observations that helped to make a difference. and there were others as well. some the president didn't really want to invite to be around him at first. i like how jeff describes the strained relationship with another former secretary of state, who is quite prominent, and is still quite prominent in the dialogue of dynamic change in the world. and yet that wisdom, i think,

was facilitated by dealing with people who shared that particular secretary of state's view on a matter of things. president bush, i do believe, was at the cusp of change of philosophy in the white house at the same time that he was at the cusp of change of the world's powers, if you will. and the cusp of change going from a reagan to a bush doesn't look very dramatic. and i'm not sure it was really dramatic, but it was a change. and, you know, brent scowcroft's views were very different than his predecessor's views, george schultz. and i'm not directly his national security adviser, but the views of the foreign policy community when president reagan was dealing with the opportunity for change that had already started to emerge through gorbachev, and that comes

through in jeff's books, too. this was not something that happened only under president bush's tenure. the seeds of change actually were planted overseas 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 weeds. and i think that 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 and fail. and find success. and 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 that somebody didn't put roundup on the seeds.

and i think that's probably what president bush did very, very well, but he did it by having the benefit of counsel from lots of different people who didn't all share the same view, except they shared the same commitment. and i think that was of great benefit to the president, and i do think that's 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'm anxious to turn on the radio and this dates me, but i used to love to listen 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, d.c. and in

other capitals, especially in europe. especially when you consider that europe was trying to give itself definition as an entity, rather than just have the sovereign definition of its members. and that was a strained period of time in the relationship between the british and the french. wait a minute, it is always a strained relationship in time between -- but it was particularly strained at this period of time as europe was trying to give definition to itself, and the british were reluctant to be part of the full definition, and the french were demanding that their definition be the definition. so i think there was -- that was a dynamic that also impacted some of the discussions about the 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, actually before it was perceived by the united states for some of the opportunities through change in

the soviet union. and so 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 noble reason and noble expectation. however, at the time, most of us in the united states were cynical of the person that presented the reform. and is there a machiavellian reason for gorbachev to do what he's doing or was it, in fact, a noble call? i think history has shown that it was more noble than machiavellian. but he came from a machiavellian society, so i'm sure machiavelli guided a lot of the people around him. and some of those players are still on the stage.

and they are looking for machiavelli to give them another opportunity, and we're witnessing that now. so i think that would be an interesting thing to put in the mix, not just what was happening here. you touched a little bit on it, what was happening in the soviet union or in russia, and they seldom called it russia at the time, but there was still a russian influence within the soviet union. and some of the leaders, well, i'll reflect on our own revolution. i'm on the board of the museum of the american revolution, which is a brand new museum being constructed in philadelphia. so i love going to the board meetings because great historians come and tell us about our own revolution and i learn something every time. but, you know, george washington wasn't winning every battle. in fact, he lost most battles as they were building up to the opportunity at york town. and now my friends in massachusetts, they were hanging tough. they were going to be in it until the bitter end no matter

what. quite a few people in pennsylvania were saying, wait a minute, we want to be with the winner. and some people in virginia started to think, maybe we want to be with the winner too. who is the winner going to be? in south carolina, they figured we weren't going to be the winner, so 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 that he wants to put in place. and 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. and satellite countries were definitely, in my opinion, trying to decide who is the

winner. what side is going to be on so there was a dynamic there. i think president bush managed better than historians acknowledge. so he was cognizant of the east germans, the czechoslovakians and the baltic states. he was cognizant of what their challenges were as they were trying to deal with an unsettled relationship that they had either liked or not liked. but it was still, who is the winner going to be? and do they have the courage to make sure there is a winner or do they want to wait to see which one emerges? so i think that was a tricky period of time in the diplomatic front that president bush and his team, and particularly brent scowcroft and jim baker i think were increasingly sensitive to it. and brent scowcroft's experience and larry eagleburg's experience, for example, in yugoslavia, i think was very

helpful as you had to deal with some of these dynamics within the soviet extended family. so i would say that you got a great start, you've told the story of how president bush became so grounded in his responsibilities and expectations and the noble call of public service. i think you 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 their relevance was. i think you have given a pretty good description of how europe was starting to observe what was happening. i don't think you've 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 at nato and how nato was responding at the same time because there were real skeptics within nato.

and the schultz/reagan expectation was more optimistic and the bush team coming in 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 and was not, but it was definitely a change. and president bush, i think, benefited by having been in the reagan administration and very much understanding of what their observations and expectations were, but he also had the benefit of people who were out, who had been observing and had very different expectations and how to deal with them. and i think that dynamic is pretty interesting. but i am ready for paul harvey's rest of the story, and so i want this to be a productive effort rather than destructive, and i would like to see the book published, and i think that it will have appeal far beyond the

academic community. and i also would remind you that president bush, number 41, was truly remarkable in that he -- not only did he have to deal with the things that jeff talked about, that we all can remember from the foreign policy front, but he also got the americans with disability bill passed, the clean air amendment passed negotiated the first agreement to reduce ozone depleting gases. he took tremendous effort to make changes in how congress worked to get a budget deal done and did that all with one four-year term. i think he was the most productive one-term president in the history of our country. >> are you launching his re-election? >> it may take the form of somebody with other initials. thank you. >> that's a proverbial tough act to follow. thanks so much, brian.

thanks will hitchcock and other members for inviting me here and to jeff for giving me this opportunity to, well, talk about his manu script. jeff brings to this project a tremendous breadth of understanding regarding american international relations at the cusp of the 1980s and 1990s. and a deep nuanced understanding of president bush's personality, character and style of leadership. 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 explore and explain. i learned a great deal from this manuscript about president bush and felt like i understand how an extraordinary man faced a momentous challenge in service to his nation and the values he cherished. values he rarely articulated, and perhaps felt no need to define. in the pages of this manu script, president bush is warmly portrayed, but the broad history reads of a critical accounting of the world view as he cautiously and prudently

oversaw the american government's response to the end of the soviet union, the restructuring of eastern europe, and the energetic leap of china into world, political and economic affairs. up front, jeff explains as he told us before that his project attempts to bring together three key narratives. one, the ark of president bush's leadership and ending the cold war, a second, the partnership between bush and gorbachev, a part we haven't quite gotten to yet in this hunk of the manuscript, and the third, a tale of the group of world leaders that played key roles in the unfolding in the last years of the cold war, what jeff calls an international history. overall jeff writes this is not the story of crowds, which is how the story of the end of the cold war is often told, he writes but is emphatically history from above. a history in which leadership matters. because this is a story of leadership, much of what jeff explores in detail and here i'm following up on andy's comments, regard his main protagonist and questions of bush's personality and character. they're not only mainly this is

presidential history in which policy, government procedure, political culture and politics figure far less than presidential personality in service to presidential decision-making. through interviews with president bush and several other key figures and an extraordinary scouring of white house and other relevant archival materials jeff shows an inside-out portrait of a famously nonintrospective man. president bush's decency shines through in this history and his caution, his willingness as jeff writes to play the tortoise to gorbachev's hare to practice what as jeff just said he calls cleverly hipocratic diplomacy. jeff argues they were well suited to the complex unfolding of events, that comprised the end of the cold war. what does not much appear in these pages is the bush that his critics saw. there is a bit of this criticism and of jeff's censor about bush's ideological limits in chapter seven. i don't know if many of you saw

that yet. he was so well versed in the historical last decades of the last century. president bush obviously was an ardent practitioner of free economics. he lived in a world in which economic success was normative and expected, though by no means a be all and end all. bush, i would think, trusted certain kinds of men and certain kinds of knowledge and certain kinds of wisdom and had little or no interest in perspectives that did not fit the political and economic conventions he inherited. he counted on a world in which profitable international trade arranged by elites figured world progress. he accepted social hierarchies of all kinds even as his core decency and civility buffered him from the sense he the world he inhabited and treated as natural were created to benefit some and limit the life courses of others. in the relatively few pages he devotes to explaining the position moderate progressivism.

but what does that mean in a broad historical context? did bush believe in cooperation between organized international labor and business? did he believe or advocate for progress in women's roles in society? did he believe in the merits of cooperation when it came to the likes of saddam hussein? the work is to some extent from a broader historical context unproblemetizes and unretracted. some are unquestioned. bush is, of course, an individual and the biographical detail revealed is marvelously recounted. bush is also a representative of a particular historical moment whose leadership is demonstrative of a world view and social position and those historical rather than biographical markers are largely left unexplored here. jeff calls bush a company man. a telling phrase, but a largely

left unexplained term. it strikes me as perhaps misleading. bush is a leader, not a middle manager. he works extraordinarily well in certain kinds of organizations but is profoundly uninterested in applying himself to solving a great many other sorts of problems. he's a great patriot but his interests in using american power abroad is reflective not of a generalized faith in american values but of a particularized vision of american principles and interests. and those are largely left undefined here. in part because president bush himself rarely articulated that. but even though president bush did not articulate these values, i think jeff has to do more inductive reasoning to explain those views to get at those issues. how such a robust energetic will to power and leadership translates into a policy driven understanding of strategy in a fast changing international arena in the late '80s and '90ss largely left unsaid. 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 bush really

meant when he used words like freedom and how he saw the role of individuals incorporations and governments in achieving society which allowed the exercise of free will, unhampered by the state. in more concrete terms i think jeff might make bush's exercise of character more vivid by giving us a better sense of how he made decisions and processed the massive flow of information that came at him in midst of so many momentous events. the pocket portraits of james baker, scowcroft and a few other bush key advisers are well told here and they are utility in advising president bush is well articulated. as far as i can tell in the section we have, the cia, nsa, nsc and state department rarely if ever appear in these pages. my understanding is that president bush was a firm believer in the information produced by the intelligence community. but we don't see that material here. maybe it will come later in the manu script. in the pages i read, bush relies an hisson feelings about the

ussr and gorbachev and china in pursuing his international policies. this vision of bush might be true. i don't know. but i would think that other critical agents in the executive branches would be channeling information to the white house and i wondier this info does not reach bush or if bush simply dismisses it or what. i don't really know. i would think it would fit you more prominently in the white house. jeff is dedicated to arguing that leadership matters and different leaders do things for their own reasons. but i have little sense in these pages i read of president bush as head of the executive branch of the government who sits atop a mountain of information formulated by broad range of experts representing different bureaucracies and administrative and political views and agend paps presidential decision making under bush seems extraordinarily titlely circumscribed and based on little empirical information. in contrast, the book of essays produced by the mill strer on the bush presidency that was just published by cornell in the

particular essay by sparrow and he comes right before jeff's essay in this book, are argues the bush white house managed national security perhaps as well as it could have been managed in the momentous era of world history and their success was the product of the policy process. now i know jeff's writing for a broad audience and the conventions of presidential history demand a focus an the president and his tight circle of leaders. after doris kearns goodwins biography with a team of rivals, we're all kind of looking for that clever way to encapsulate this sense of how presidential administrations actually work. still, i think jeff can do more in explaining how bush the company man produced and orgstraighted such a superb foreign policy team and how specifically he was able to train his attention at key materials and receive the advice he did. while it can be dull it can also be fascinating as many best selling books on business management shows. and i think demonstrative to

which good administration and good management of the life blood of good decision making. i have a feeling as historians look back at the bush white house administrative capacity and decision-making processes will be a key aspect of the historiography of the bush presidency. i think it will stand out for that. and while it seems likely sparrow is right in praising the bush white house's effort, we need to know where that system of white house advising failed or failed to deliver key information or insight. in other words, what did the system fail to produce and what kind of advisers were unable to make themselves heard in the white house? leadership as jeff argues is critically important aspect of the history of the cold war. greater attention to how bush led his white house and administration into the unavoidable fog of security policy making would strengthen the power of this work. in related vain, i was surprised how little attention jeff gives to congress, to public opinion, or the political context in

which bush operates. more than 300 pages of the manuscript he gives them about five pages on such matters. does such indifference to democratic politics and the democratic process refuse his dismissal or is it indicative of the type of leader bush was? or what? jeff says he's not much interested in accounting for the behavior of crowds in any of the cold war. but the near absence of the american people either as actors in their own right or subjects of president bush's concerns is striking. president bush clearly was not president clinton who was energized by interests in interacting with individual americans of all kinds. but i do wonder what the partisan -- i do wonder what the president made of his duties. he was charged with leading through the turmoil of the late '80s and '90s. jeff spends a great many pages

writing not about president bush and the bush white house policy making but about the parallel histories of how other nation states approach the ending of the cold war. china and chinese leaders in particular figure prominently in the manuscript sections i read. a main reason it has so many pages is that jeff and a tour de force job of research and writing gives his readers long narratives of how the end of the cold war appeared to those nations and why their most prominent leaders saw the world ad they did. it greatly expands the breadth of jeff's story. and in which presidential decisions often depend. such an international perspective in which other nations and foreign leaders are juxtaposed to the american perspective have become the fashion in the writing of diplomatic and international relations history for a very good reason. such broad perspectival histories make clear the united states policymakers act in a world bound by different interests and different

principles which makes the american position in the world clear in its distinctions and its similarities to other powers both great and small. this internationalizing project has obvious strengths and the pages jeff spends on parallel accounts are compelling. but at rink of being a contrarian, i also see a weakness in this approach. and i think i'm following a little bit of what andy card said. jeff almost never lets these parallel histories or foreign leaders perceptions to u.s. policymakers or to president bush's understanding of the changing strategic environment in which he must operate. rather than give readers such lengthy nearly independent accounts and different leaders historical understandings and trajectories, my thought it would be more useful and central to his actual research and argument if he told us what bush administration officials did and did not know about these foreign histories and foreign policies and foreign leaders views. instead he shows hem as concurrent or semiparallel tracks to what's happening in the bush administration.

perhaps what these foreign leaders understand and did not understand about the united states and the bush white house would better explain the critical action -- interaction between those nations and the bush-led white house. i would think it more pertinent to the story of president bush's international leadership to analyze what the white house understands and does not understand, knows and does not know about foreign leaders' actions and the political context in which those leaders feel they must act. here, to, the lack of historical acting of internal information dissemination is striking. the process of policy making and the information and cultural precepts and ideological understandings that undergird that policy making is often missing. jeff's parallel stories of the last years of the cold war informative but given 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 an the

historical trajectory of nation states and more on how the white house under bush perceived these key nations and how they perceived the united states might make for a sharper analytic approach to the role of international leadership and to the american role in leadership brunging the cold war to an end. to some extent, i hope you see that my critical concerns here are just a way to show that i read the manuscript. many thanks to jeff and the miller center for giving me the chance to read this and like andy, i can't wait to see the ref rest of this manuscript. thanks so much. >> wow. i got friday afternoon at 1:00. it is great to be here. i'm really happy to be part of this discussion. and thank you to the miller center also for letting me be part of it. and also i presume jeffrey might

have had something to do with this. and i'm a very happy to have had the opportunity to get to read this manuscript as it is about halfway -- we read a little less than half of the final manuscript. so one of the great things about that, i guess, is that you'll get to stand up and say all of this will be taken care of in the last half, right? i really enjoyed the book as it stands now. and one of the things i appreciated was that it did take such careful attention to the characters, the people around bush in particular. he has a lot of sort of short biographies of important policymakers. and i've seen this in other histories too. sometimes it can have the feel of, like, early vaudeville where a character comes in and speaks for a minute and then a crook comes in and pulls them off, you know, and another one shows up. that doesn't happen here. it actually really integrates, i think, beautiful way to helping

us understand what the bush white house looked like and what people brought into those 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 the more -- some of the recent scholarship on the cold war that really asks us to think about the cold war as something that happens in the third world. i'm thinking of "the global cold war" and a lot of the scholarship that has followed from that. which argues the cold war is not just an east/west, soviet/u.s. conflict but also argues that china is central as you do and i think crucially so. and i know the iraq war is coming in the manuscript and i can't wait to read that. i wonder several times in the manuscript you talk about in the cold war period, talk about the proxy wars that are happening elsewhere. and i think some scholarship more recently into my mind

hopefully 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 go on in the world. so bringing the cold war in, or bringing other places in to our thinking about the cold war seems to me to allow us to complicate the narrative of what else is going on in the world, proxy wars, but also to complicate how we think about the cold war itself. i'll just mention lately i've been doing some research on south africa, and as we think about what is going on in the 1980s, we can think about south africa as something that was understood. the events in south africa and the slow end of apartheid over the course of the 1980s something understood by reagan, very much in the cold war context, but also something else altogether. so when you talk about the cold war and reagan's relationship to it, south africa is barely mentioned, and, of course, you can't do everything, i know

that. but the period from 1984 to 1989, soon to be president bush's developing his thinking about foreign policy, includes the township revolt in south africa, the state of emergency for five years. then in 1989, the desegregation of public facilities in south africa, de klerk meets mandela in that year. mandela is released in 1990. the anc is unbanned and the repeal of apartheid laws in 1991. and we know the elections a couple of years later. so the end of the cold war does involve the slowing down and ultimately the end of u.s. support for apartheid, but also involves -- the end of apartheid involves a great many other things. the u.s. is nonetheless central to that whole conversation. i think that conversation -- that events in south africa are also central to help people thinking about the cold war, or a certain subset of people. i would like to hear from you,

whether you agree with the view others 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 were worlds enough in time and how does the global south figure in before iraq or simultaneously to it. so i have three more specific questions. i think david quoted the line in the introduction where you say the story you're telling is not a story of crowds. and yet i really want to ask, where are the social movements in this story? there is a great moment, if brief, in one part of the manuscript talking about the movement against short -- medium range missiles in europe and west germany nuclear movement, but there is very little talking about social movements in the united states. those which may have at least shaped the world in which

president bush had to make decisions. i think sometimes and i suspect a little of this that u.s. historians, diplomatic historians, might allow other countries have social movements, but mostly the u.s. has tv. so there is going to be a lot about social movements in china. there is, of course in eastern europe, but in the united states liberals in particular are involved in anti-apartheid activism and activism against the contras in the 1980s, anti-nuclear activism, liberals and conservatives involved deeply in human rights activism vis-a-vis the eastern europe and the soviet union. and that activism does shape the response to gorbachev in public and the ways in which his popularity becomes such an issue for the bush white house. so there is a great moment when he talks about the day after the 1983 movie, which i also

remember very well too, that scared everybody to death about nuclear war, but there is no mention of 1 million people showing up in central park the year before to protest nuclear war. as well as nuclear weapons, potential of nuclear war and also nuclear power. so i think that some of the embrace of gorbachev, both in the u.s. and in europe, has to do with an activist and activated social movement, one that linked human rights issues going on in eastern europe in particular with anti-nuclear activism. and that in part these folks are coming together, so excited about gorbachev, so excited about the possibility of the end of the cold war, and maybe the disappointment with the pause. i'll come back to david's point about congress or other political actors. maybe this disappointment, this deep disappointment with the pause where the bush administration comes in and basically says we're going to think a lot now for the first five months. and it is beautifully described,

but the disappointment that the public felt maybe is not just the disappointment about sort of presidential leadership in general or how people take advantage of the 100 days, but about a whole realm of people who are really hoping for change and who have been out there protesting, worrying, watching television, for sure, but making a social movement, a set of social movements, different one. so the movements sometimes overlap and are very different people, but they were all paying great attention to what was happening and i would like to hear a little bit more are about those crowds. my second point is that very related to this one is that i think that americans' feelings about the cold war, and what we have goes through the beginning of 1989. it is not just that i'm obsessed with the cold war itself and not its end, but that's what we're talking about mostly in the manuscript we have. that americans' feelings about the cold war were a little bit more nuanced. i mean here popular opinion, than the story that jeffrey

tells. so he is great on the reagan versus the bush white house opinions about gorbachev and the soviet union and reagan being so -- you can see reagan so optimistic and hopeful and bush coming in more careful and wary. and the advisers around him very similarly. when we think about how americans were thinking about the end of the cold war, the potential end of the cold war, the late cold war, jeffrey mentions there is a popular wariness about the soviet union. polls show that people might like gorbachev but they are still wary about the soviet union and so they have some real doubts about what the u.s. should do in terms of disarmament. but i think that people's fear in the cold war, although it is often phrased as being wary about the soviet union, in practice, is also deep wariness and anger and fear about the events -- about the threats that the cold war raise. so nuclear war is a real fear.

people are really worried about it in the 1980s. the money that is being spent on weapons in times of already some serious economic crisis, people are worried. and that they -- there is a tension in public opinion that i would like to see unpacked a little bit more. that the reagan and bush white houses might have been neatly divided. but i think many people in the american public were divided against themselves. the complexity of what people felt about the dangers of the soviet union, but also the dangers of the nuclear buildup seem to me to involve more -- needed greater level of nuance in unpacking that. and i think there is -- as it stands too much of a sense of the cold war sort of going from duck and cover to 1989 with not too much change in how the american people thought about it. in fact, i think we see enormous change in complexity i would

like to hear more about. and finally, briefly, so the middle east, i am really interested in how you're going to talk about the iraq war, perhaps not surprisingly, but i'm interested in thinking, too, about what the bush white house comes in with and how prepared they are or are not for dealing with what happens in kuwait and ultimately the onset and pursuit of the first iraq war. what was then called the second persian gulf war but now first iraq war. reagan paid a lot of attention to the middle east for very good reasons. i'll mention two. the 1982 israeli invasion of lebanon, i'll mention three, and ensuing bombing of the marine barracks in 1983, which was in many ways extraordinary disaster for u.s. foreign policy and ongoing attention to the iran/iraq war in which the policy of dual containment of supporting first iran and then iraq and then iran and then iraq

played ultimately a real role in how i believe would play a real role in how a number of policymakers are thinking about the region and the necessity of, quote, containing iraq as a regional power when the u.s. goes into the war in iraq in 1990-'91. i'd like to know whether the bush administration policymakers come in with the middle east on their agenda in some way, and to what degree, and how prepared are they for what is going to happen in iraq just, you know, a year after the -- well, right during the middle of the end of the cold war, vis-a-vis the soviet union. so these are some questions that i bring to the overall manuscript and to what is going to come in the next half. that said, and i will agree again that this is an

extraordinary manuscript. and i have to say i did say this to several people coming in, i am not only not a presidential biographer. i usually approach presidential biographies with a certain amount of dread, and i did approach this one with some question about how fascinating it would be to read knowing it be would be important, and it was fascinating to read. it was actually hard to put down. beautifully written and very exciting, and it tells the story of -- i actually -- i did love the international history component and the bringing in of the long and fascinating chapters about what else is going on in the world, separate from how the u.s. saw it. and the combination of paying close attention to the policymaking leaders in the united states and the context in the rest of the world has led to what i think is one of the most promising manuscripts for thinking about this period i could imagine, and i'm really looking forward to the book.

>> okay. we're going to give jeff a chance to respond. and then we're going to take -- we have at least 45 minutes to take questions from our distinguished audience. we're going to open it up and to give jeff a little more time to think about his six pages of notes. is that what i see here? i'm going to take this moment to thank a couple of people as we wrap up this conference. first and foremost, evan d. mccormick, stand up. evan. i can assure you none of us would be here without evan. and i also want to thank reed forbes who coordinated all of the food and drink and logistics of the conference. and i want to thank rob canavari and the av staff, the web staff

and the ultimate compliment to rob is you haven't even seen him yet. everything has worked very smoothly. so thanks very much. and now back to our regularly scheduled programming. >> thank you. although you should offer your comments too. i know you read it as well. >> well, i will give you 15 more seconds, and i feel the way melani does. about most presidential biographies. and three things happened for me in the pages that i was able to read that have never happened before with a presidential biography. i laughed. i cried. and i wanted to know more. so that's my basic take on what i've read so far. i think it is beautifully written, and i can't wait to see the final version. >> thank you. i should mention that he told me earlier he cried when he had to pick it up.

so -- you know, obviously i'm in an awkward position because these are such wonderful and synthetic and thoughtful comments. and it would be very easy, as was already alluded to, to simply say, yeah, it is all going to be explained in pages to come. so let me just cut to the chase and say, that's all going to be explained in pages to come. and in particular, i want to explain to everyone here that what people here were offered was about 40% of the manuscript. and there is about another 10% that has been written but the place where we are, these kind folks had to read, is essentially the early spring of 1989. so a lot is about to happen. and i really am grateful in particular for david's point that i need to ensure that there is a thoughtful analysis of how decision-making and intelligence in particular is used by the white house. and especially it is useful going forward because i believe

that there are crises about to explode which will give opportunity to see how the white house uses information and how house uses information and how far it goes back now with the comments and think about not only the previous discussions to show how bush is integrating information up through 1989 and also to really keep a keen eye on that as i go forward. in fact, i'll make, just preview something that i've written bullet you have not seen, which is the discussion of tiananmen square. and here, i think, i can say that this is an area where i have a real criticism of the president's handling of events, for informational reasons that is different from the way he handled soviet affairs. for soviet affairs, i think bush was very, very good about integrating intelligence information and as you point out, i need to do a better job of showing that going forward. the president considered him to

be his own china expert and understood china, he thought, as well as anybody. better than anybody. in many cases. he served as de facto ambassador to china, had a deep relationship with china's leaders for many years up to this point and it's very interesting to me that a policymaker, bush baker, in particular, in fact, this is the only area in particular where james baker inserts himself into tiananmen square. for the most part, things bro up in tiananmen square. and this is a little bit hyperbolic, but things blow up and james bakker says i'm focused on the soviet union, and leaves it to scowcroft and to others to -- and the president to deal with it and he admits this in his memoirs, baker does, because he says the president was the expert on china and i was trying to deal with complex issues on the other side of the world. interestingly enough, for all the people dealing with china,

things go south in china, there are protests that seem optimistic and get repressed. baker says, look, these people are marching just like they are in eastern europe. and i go into a great detail to show thoot, no, they actually were not. yes, they were marching, yes, they were carrying banners saying freedom and democracy and eastern european protesters were smart enough to put those signs in english so they could be read by an international audience. but the chinese students had a different conception of what freedom meant. and that nuance was not seen by the administration, which is significant, i think, in a sense of unpacking the world view, though i would argue that no matter what the perception of what chinese protesters were doing, vis-a-vis european protesters, the bush administration would have adopted the same policy approach to china, which was to say, yes, tiananmen was horrible. horrific in ways that defies

description. but the stream of history is still moving forward. let's make sure we don't cut china off as opposed to bringing it in. again, this is something which i want to explore and i'm really glad you brought my attention to that. one other -- i think the crisis -- one other point i'll make, and then leave it open to discussion is really this question of -- that melani raises of what is the domestic scene, and how is that affecting u.s. policy? because i think you actually make an extraordinarily brilliant insight which is that u.s. foreign policy people are really good at and have thought a lot about domestic afir firff other countries but not in their own. that's smart. i have to really pay attention to that. it is 100% true. we're bad at unpacking our own society and so that's something that i think needs to be paid attention to. it's interesting, you raise the issue of the global south and what the importance was there. and here i'm suspect i'm going to become remarkably unpopular

in about ten seconds, to say that the argument that the global south drove the cold war, definitive of the cold war, at the very least does not appear within the bush record. here's a case in point where lots of events are going on. south africa is a tremendous example. there is unbelievable change in south africa, historic, unprecedented change and the administration says, see, everything is going our way throughout the world, now let's focus on the real locus of attention which is gorbachev. everything else will unfold and all will be nirvana throughout the developing world. i think here is a case where i do not see the south, global south playing a particular role, again, within the way the bush at administration dealt with things. certainly for the bush administration, that seems to be the way i'm reading their substitutions. i think after that, i should probably just throw it open for other thoughts. >> great. if you put your hand up, we'll start with jim and taking notes

and just signal to me, even while someone's talking, signal quietly and i'll get around to you. and if everybody would simply identify themselves before they ask their question. >> jim hershberg from george washington university. one quick question for jeffrey and two small questions i hope will be relevant for jeffrey for andrew. one for jeff, i know that you know that i'm a huge believer in international history and wr wruzing international sources. and amazing materials are now open in moscomoscow. i'm wondering if you could point to one lingering mystery in your research that you want to solve. what would that be? there may be possibilities in going for unusual sources that could lead in that direction. and my question for andrew card, both involve issues of h.w. bush's personality that you

would not find in documents, but i think are very relevant, where i had a certain impression about bush from distant observation, but you were very close. i'm curious your opinion. one had to do with his attitude about the cold war when he first became president. my general sense is that in terms of psychology and personality that george h.w. bush and jimmy carter would have been most comfortable had they switched positions as president. that george h.w. bush was very comfortable waging the cold war and it took a period of psychological adjustment to really become comfortable with the idea this is all over and this is a new world. whereas jimmy carter wanted to end the cold war and had to adjust to essentially becoming a cold warrior. i'm curious if that was your sense watching him closely? he was built to wage the cold war and he really had a psychologically overcome in the the period that jeff has started

to write about. the second had to do with what i see as george h.w. bush's greatest foreign policy failure, aside from quite -- aside from his admitted successes. i don't know whether jeffrey will get to this issue in his book, but i presume he will. that was his decision not to intervene to limit the war in the former yugoslavia at a time when the u.s. had maximum credibility after its defeat of iraq and essentially squandering that credibility using as an excuse, let's let the europeans handle it even after it was clear the europeans were bungling it and not able to handle it. i was wondering to what extent those were legitimate policy considerations? was it essentially just psychological exhaustion? and distraction after this stress of waging the iraq war as well as simply dealing with the process of dealing with change in europe and legitimate policy arguments being made? thank you. >> i was going to say, he can go first because i want to hear what he has to say.

in brief, you know, interestingly enough, the biggest mystery and question i had, we just got solved. i say we because there is a large team of people who are trying -- who are working very hard and have been since 2004, actually before that, but i was involved in fwour, 2004, to bring new documents out of the bush archives. the national archives have done heroic work and need to be lauded and applauded for it to bring out new documents. at one point, we had more documents requested for declassification review than all the other presidential libraries combined. and that made us feel good. we just started to really get them out. one of the mysteries, i just got a huge tranche of documents a few months ago, one thing in there was something that had really gotten under my skin which was the minutes of the first national security council meeting after saddam hussein

invaded in 1990, this was troubling baue ining because al minutes from the war had already been released. and the first one still was not. and, in fact, i thought it was particularly unfair because president bush and richard hoss and others quote in their memoirs from this meeting. and others. the u.n. ambassador, for example, has a long discussion of what the meeting was like, though it subsequently turns out it was in new york at the time, which should tell us something about memory. it was really unfair to me that other people could quote this and we couldn't. if you want to say what happened to me, that's one thing, but if you don't have a quote, that doesn't seem like good baseball. and so we finally got it. and all i can tell you is boy, was that classified for a reason. i can go into great detail which i won't now about the truly horrific things that are said about american allies at this moment of great crisis that it is probably good that the wikileaks folks didn't get that first.

you know, so that's mystery was solved. there was another part to your question which -- >> no, i -- >> andy, please. >> vis-a-vis president bush's capacity to -- what war did he want to be engaged in? maybe that's -- he's really not someone who likes war. cold war or hot war. he was -- i really think that his makeup, and partly because i think he went to war as a teenager, that, gee, this is not good. cold or hot. so he was not a warrior president at all. and so i don't think he was relishing jimmy carter's role, oh, i wish i could have been there for that. i think he was actually going to be very careful with the role that he had -- he was assigned

so that he didn't create a cold war or a hot war. so i think -- he was a very good listener, and most presidents i find aren't good listeners. he was a very good listen per. and he was slow to respond. and sometimes frustratingly slow. but he was very contemplative and he was actually quiet in his response. it wasn't a bombastic response. even in meetings where other were being very bombastic, he kind of allowed the bombast to come out, it sat there and then he calmly responded to it. which was really quite effective. now, with regard to the foreign policy failure that you cite, which was yugoslavia, and i'm going it almost agree with you, not quite as failure, failure,

but as really tough. but i think the president was influenced by two people who i mentioned earlier who had a parochial view of yugoslavia. because they had served there. brent scowcroft and larry eagleburger. they were very influential in the debates that took place with larry and the deputies committee, and with brent, obviously, the national security committee, and i don't want to say they were invested in the geography in how that geography had been defined, but my perception was they didn't realize how darn tribal yugoslavia was, and yet, most of the challenges in yugoslavia at the time resulted in the tribes deciding to organize rather than the nation trying to organize. yugoslavia was held together because of a dictator. it was a country created after the world war, and it was held

together by tito and how he did his job. and i -- most diplomats like the world order not to change. so they like the boundaries, the national boundaries to be as they have been, so we can deal with whatever institutions are chosen to lead within those boundaries. when yugoslavia started to implode, because the strong leader was no longer leading, they said, no, we have to maintain those boundaries, maintain those borders. and i think that it failed to recognize the strong tribal and i use tribal not -- by almost any definition you can come up with, but they were very tribal boundaries that were more historic or faith-based or whatever, and grassroots politics was driving the

response rather than top-down politics. i think both brent and larry are were predisposed to say, it was much easier when we dealt with the top-down folks. and so there was a predisposition not to get engaged in the tribal warfare that was taking place. some of it was hot. most of it was not. it was political. and let's let the europeans deal with it because they understand the tribes better than we do, so i don't want to say it was those two personalities that probably helped influence the president not to get overly engaged in yugoslavia, but the suspect that those two permits did influence the president. [ inaudible question ] >> how much can you carry on your plate? president george w. bush had more on his plate than any win one-term president. awful lot on his plate. he was a president who didn't have either house of congress with him. he had a lot of challenges to

deal whatever solution he was offering, whether domestic and foreign policy. loud and serious and frequent contrarian echo and he had to deal with that. at the same time that any first-term president is also focused a little bit on their opportunity to be a two-term president. so that was building over the time, especially when yugoslavia was going to implode. >> let me follow up on this because i think it directly -- i agree with everything andy just said and think it touches on something you were mentioning, david, that here is an area where i think one can really interrogate the constrained limits and the structures that bound bush's world view. because the nation state really is one of those structures. it was very difficult at the end of the cold war -- the new world order was all about the united states and nation states treating each other well which is one of the reasons the war in iraq fit so nicely with bush. ethnic tension, dare i say

terrorism ultimately, was not the prevalent issue in bush's world view. >> will hitchcock here at the miller center and the history department. before we came in, we had a really nice opportunity to talk with secretary card just about his experiences and one of the things you raised in our conversation was just the kaleidoscope of burdens that's on the president at any one time. jeff, i think each of your commentators in different and very sophisticated ways has brought some attention, some criticism so what you have done so far that there's much more on the plate of george h.w. bush than foreign policy. of course, that's your subject, that's your focus. here's my question. i think i know what you're going to say, you have to say this, but for the purposes of

discussion about the methodology you're pursuing, i want to ask if we really can write a good presidential study, a study of presidential leadership without into account domestic politics, economic policy, the legislative agenda that the president is pursuing at the same time that he's trying to end the cold war? the question of not only public opinion, but the constant changing of public opinion, the pursuit of a second term. these are issues that are not peripheral. they're absolutely fundamental and i think they would probably occupy as much time if you went through the clock of a given presidential day as foreign relations does. so, obviously, you're writing principally on the way president bush handle foreign policy and the end of the cold war, but how are you going -- how will you find a way to address these criticisms? because this isn't the first time you're going to hear --

this isn't the last time you're going to hear this line of criticism. what about the rest, the other half of the job? >> this is a problem. to my mind, i think the sacrifice of the domestic is what i have been forced to make, though obviously i need to a better job of making sure that it's not a complete 100% sacrifice. the sacrifice of an interrogation of the domestic as well as force to make in order to include the international side because i think one could write a full study of a presidency, domestic and foreign, something like eisenhower, for example, would be good. >> you do need a new book. >> we do. we do need a new book on eisenhower. i think one could do that, but you would simply not have enough pages, it seems to me, even with the most generous of editors, you would not have enough pages to also do the same for the international scene. i think i have a good benefit here that this was a president --

this was a criticism of him, but i think it was bounded in truth, who cared significantly if not primarily about foreign policy, certainly during major crises. and so to focus on the foreign policy for him makes more sense for bush than it would for others during this period. but this is a difficulty. in fact i should mention the evolution of the study. this study originally set out to be full soup-to-nuts george bush foreign policy. i had the model still -- i should say it out, because it's no longer a model, but it's a nice paperweight. it goes basically from "a" to "z" from 33 to 35 covering all foreign policy issues. simply two things occurred. i realized the voluminous data we have for everything around the world was simply going to make a similar study of bush, if there's going to be an international component, that much more voluminous to the point of, perhaps, impossible.

and secondly, this i really have to thank my editor for, there was a moment where we were discussing how to square this circle because i still want to do everything. he said, what to you really care about? i said, i really care about the end of the cold war. he said, done. my conception of the cold war also involves china, other areas around the world that aren't always necessarily put in the story that is oftentimes told from germany to the east. even still, i'm trying to have a narrative structure that offers the economic view. i don't know that one could do -- i could not do without really running into -- without really needing a divorce lawyer, probably. i could not do that full synthetic study in less than 2,000, 4,000 pages, and i wouldn't read that. >> can i offer commentary? i actually agree with jeff on this, although he's done it

effectively for one tiny instance with gorbachev. gorbachev's visit to the united nations, his speech there. visit to new york city and the crowds coming out. a wonderfully orchestrated public relations tour for america and the world to witness. it did change the perception of the world about gorbachev, and made him. kind of a rallying figure, we can say, hey, he wants to do the right thing. i guarantee that the general secretary of the soviet union expected he was going to have ongoing communications planned that would be implemented for probably months, but an earthquake happened in armenia, and it disrupted his cadence. you'll find thousands of examples for president bush, where there were hurricanes or

tornadoes or fires, or lee atwater dying, or his mother getting sick or kennebunkport getting hit by the perfect storm. there were lots of distractions that came in the midst of responsibility. you could not -- there aren't enough volumes to be able to be read by anybody. >> including a very personal one. not only that the destruction of the house up in kennebunkport, but also toward the end of the administration, president bush and mrs. bush and the dog all develop a thyroid problem, simultaneously. >> that's right. no, that's true. >> this obviously causes the secret service much consternation. that's not supposed to happen, three people develop it, two people and a dog. so this really was time-consuming, how to regulate the president's health. in fact, he and those around him complained that he was more fatigued as they tried to get

the medicine right, but also you had to inspect the water and why is the dog sick? so that's going to appear, but i don't think i'll have a chapter on thyroid -- >> rebecca? >> i have a follow-on to -- >> who are you? >> oh, sorry. rebecca brewbaker, one of the fellows from this year. first, i appreciated your analogy at the beginning that bush thought history was flowing, and his mission was to manage the flow around the rocks rather than diverting it or stopping it. beyond the two times where you mentioned, so to speak, he dipped his hands in that flow to guide events, was there a third that he, an omission that he most regretted or he wish he would have dipped his hand and he hadn't? i would have wondered about yugoslavia.

you already talked a little about that. maybe a related question, was there any point near the end of his presidency that you've run into where he started to question whether that flow was headed in a better direction as opposed to just a different direction, to maybe a more volatile and dangerous and different ways? did the optimism for the direction of the flow always stay with him i guess is the question. >> there was a lot happening in africa. the president knew what was happening because he would get reports. that would be reported up, and he would be somewhat frustrated if it was too much to deal with right now, and a defense department that was saying don't look to us. please, do not look to us. i mean, you had big famines, you had disruptive governance. you had the throes of the end of the relationship with the soviet union that was the lifeline for

some of these governments in africa, so there was a lot to pay attention to in africa and the president was predisposed to want to pay a lot of attention to it, but he had to exercise great discipline and set priority. because a jim baker couldn't be preoccupied with some of these distractions that were not distractions for the people who were hungry and he'd have to send people over to help and make things happen. there was an awful lot going on. president bush, because he had been as, probably the best trained president ever, he would bring with him, gosh, i would have been paying a lot of attention to this, i want to know about it, yes, i want to get involved, i should be there, i want to know what's going on. and he did want to know what's going on, and he was restrained and say somebody else is going to have to pay attention to this and give me regular reports, and if it reaches the next

threshold, ring my bell. >> i think so moul aulmalia is example where the president finally decides to do something. and the story which one hears about the president's ultimate decision-making is a very private one about somalia. i should caution this by saying i have no documentary evidence for the story. but i have heard it separately and individually from so many people -- when everybody is telling the same tune, and i would love to hear your thoughts if you remember this the same or differently. obviously somalia is building, this is no surprise to anyone that the famine is going on, the reports of trying to stabilize somalia have been across the president's desk for months on end. ultimately, this is very, very obviously late in the game for the administration, ultimately the president is upstairs watching television and, you knows, there are images of starving children and essentially the announcer saids, can't somebody do something? you know, and he says, i can do something, you know?

and more importantly, i have a moral imperative to do something. of course, when he presents the idea of doing something to his national security staff, they say, are you crazy? what's the exit strategy? he says the exit strategy is feeding children. i think that's when he discards the hippocratic, but that's also very, very late in the game. >> dale? >> hi. oh. hi. dale copeland, department of politics, university of virginia. jeff, i'm going to come at you sort of from a political sciencey point of view here, because i've heard a lot of interesting descriptions of what's been happening, but i kind of want a causal story that -- i to know where you fit into the causal debates about the end of the cold war, because as i say it, there are three or four big ones.

straightforward, gorbachev and the bureau realized they were way overspending on military. they had to reduce the military spending or they'd be a defunct great power. reagan and bush pushed them to the ground with their own arms buildup, star wars and so forth. that's the causal story that forced the end of the cold war. reluctantly on the soviet union and very much in favor of what the u.s. got out of it. the second story is gorbachev is a liberal or more ideologically different soviet leader who's got this vision, you know, quasi-liberal vision for how he wants the soviet union to change and to become a more integrated part of the world community. even though he in his memoirs claims he's a leninist. that's the sort of story. i don't buy it, obviously. the third story i'm very sympathetic to is the soviet regime, even before gorbachev,

but especially under gorbachev, realized they needed the trade in technology that the west could offer. if they were going to revitalize the economic structure of the soviet union and make it a viable superpower into the long term. military, yes, that was important. more importantly, revitalize the economic base of the soviet union so the soviet union could, indeed, become an important player into the 21st century, otherwise they thought they would economically decline and therefore politically and militarily be no longer viable. i guess the fourth story is a more personalistic story of personalities. gorbachev versus reagan, gorbachev versus bush. only i read three manuscripts of your story. i'm not sure what the causal story is there other than descriptively they liked each other or grew to trust one another. the story that a political scientist like myself would want to ask is what conditions

allowed that trust to develop? especially with reagan who was very much an anti-soviet individual. how does that trust develop? what are the material or ideological or cultural circumstances hanging over these leaders that allow their personalities to play such an important role at this critical time? to me, a descriptive story of their personalities talking to one another and having trust build doesn't tell me more what i really want to know which is what's the causal reasons why they were able to do it and let's say kissinger and nixon who built up a detant able to do it? why was carter able to do it but these individuals weren't able to do it? i extract from the descriptive story to look at the causal conditions under which this would work. >> that's a great question. two initial short responses and a longer one.

the first is i've never been proud are to not be a political scientist. >> what does that mean? >> it's a narrative approach. you may interpret it -- i'm -- i saw him take his shirt off, pull the wall down, it was all over. in all seriousness, i think the view which i take is a combination of selveral of the different themes you've established. i think there's also -- this is perhaps where we see a disciplinary distinction. there is an element of chaos also that i think is significant at the end. of all the players in this story, this is one of the tensions within the book, that george bush has got his name on the title, but gorbachev is really the most important person in all of this. gorbachev is the one who recognizes, as do others in the soviet union, that the system needs to change. i'm actually not impressed with the idea of adopting technology, but they need to open the system

up and adopt more western ways because socialism is not working and we should never forget gorbachev did not want the soviet union to end. >> exactly. >> and importantly, he was a vowed socialist. he was saying, how can i save the system? not how i can guard the system. that's quite crucial. he wanted to open up the system to integrate. what's interesting to me, his ideas do evolve, even during the relatively short time he's in office. it's really only six years this all occurred for him. he begins with the notion we need to change the system, integrate reforms and open things up within the soviet union. i don't think it's until about 1988, '89, the u.n. speech is the best public indication of this when he begins to talk about his vision of a new world order. he uses that phrase. a new world order. which is one the soviet union has more integrated with the western europe and begins the rhetoric which doesn't even appear until june of 1989 of a

common european home. this notion and rhetoric of the common european home squares bejesus out of americans fwh s e they recognize if the europeans are building a home, we don't have a wing. we're not it. they use that architectural metaphor to say this is the central problem that gorbachev is posing for us. then something significant happens. gorbachev is the catalyst, and fwo gorbachev opens up -- whichever metaphor you want. he took the cork out of the, and people begin to run with it. gorbachev never envisioned losing control the way he did. he was very explicit with people like east germany, we will not back you if you use force, and don't forget we have a lot of soviet troops on the eastern german soil. so i think the story i would tell is one of decaying soviet

union which almost everybody recognizes. gorbachev willing to make changes, and then the change speeding up and catalyzing in ways even he did not predict. >> can i add one thing? it wasn't just president bush's personality. it was the complementary with an "e" personality of jim bakker. and his -- so gorbachev could deal with the president respectfully and infrequently. jim bakker had a very good relationship, and they get along well, and that created a climate that i think encouraged gorbachev that, hey, this might work. i do think gorbachev was trying to reform the soviet union, not dissolve it. and i think that he ended up being a believer that he could do actually more for his people if he were to have a more open society that would be engaged,

and so i think that he became a believer, but i -- i just don't think it would have happened just with the one personality. i think you had to have at least two personalities on each side, and remember, jack matlock, our ambassador, was a cynic. didn't really think it would work at the beginning. so the president was getting lots of different views, bullet i think jim bakker's relationshp ended up being very constructive as well as here's another case where the personalities in the individual moments matter, it's crucial with this relationship. he says i don't know anything about foreign policy. and gorbachev says exactly, because we're going to do everything different, you approach this all with fresh eyes.

bakker sends these wonderful private communications to the white house for bush and scowcroft essentially, although i don't know how many other eyes saw that. says for their eyes only. in which bakker says you would not believe how honest this guy is being with us. that they are afraid and don't know where things are going and they are afraid of their own public if they don't get reform moving fast enough and they're also afraid of conservatives if they move too fast. it's hard to imagine him demonstrating fear, but he was open to it, so i think the permit personalities really matter there. >> what i think is interesting in the ways both of you have spoken, you might say the fundamental driving force is what people have suggested which is soviet decline. the decline that in some sense kicked in in the late '60s which they understood, got them going into the first detaunt, then

linkage politics, then the realization in the early '80s this was worst than the '60s, 0% growth, et cetera. so the fear of relative decline and the need to integrate the soviet union is pushing gorbachev to take steps that become more and more radical including domestic reforms that lead to what you're talking about, this instability by 1989 that wasn't present in 1985 and wasn't even foreseen, of course. and it's 89, of course, eastern europe domestic instability. so what i hear -- i think it's a multicausal story that i'm hearing, but one of the causal factors i see so forceful in both of your responses is without this fundamental relative decline of the understanding of the soviets, not just gorbachev, that unless we do something big, we aren't going to be a superpower for long or at least the next couple of decades. is that -- am i hearing you right? that in some sense that's

pushing an avowed leninist socialist to make what looked like liberal reforms, but he's doing it in an instrumental way to overcome this decline problem that's self-pervasive? >> i actually believe in gorbachev's peripheral vision, not knowing how to describe it otherwise. you also have a relationship with a polish pope calling attention to what has happened in poland, the soviet union. and if you're going to say glasnost is taking root in some place in the soviet union and had margaret thatcher with ronald reagan shining spotlights that caused others within the soviet union to say, wait a minute, this is not a monolithic soviet union gorbachev game. i think there's a lot of pressure coming from poland and

czechoslovakia and other places. things are happening. so, and the pope is giving permission for it to happen. >> and i think, for me, the best way to understand this with all these different cross currents, as andy mentioned, is that i think what gorbachev launched more than anything else is an intellectual revolution within his country, that the moment that you say we are going to allow not only reform and change, because everybody likes reform and change, bullet rather reform and change not centralized in moscow and reform and change on the factory floor allows people to begin to question, and that's where things really begin to catalyze and others throughout eastern europe twin to take this and run with it as well. but for me, i think at the hart, it is the exclamation that you're describing which is the recognition of soviet decline then the decision to make not only structural changes but intellectual changes as well, none of which has anything to do

with the united states. yes, i think there's is one pernicious, evil, lie in history which is driving u.s. foreign policy in terrible directions in the 21st century. it's the notion that we spent the soviets into the ground. >> i agree. >> yeah. to anybody who's watching on c-span, we didn't. >> st. charles university. i think there's a fifth explanation, actually. gorbachev centered, also, for the end of the cold war. i have two comments and then a question centering on the vision thing and the new world order. the decline of the soviet system i think was gorbachev centered, but if you take a look at his comments, especially retrospective comments, what he thought was going on, he called the end of the soviet union -- he called the soviet experiment a dead end in social evolution. i think that's pretty much a

direct quote. and what he realized, i think, was soviet ideology as it had played out had no chance of being realized in a rapidly globalizing world. that the soviet union was actually isolating it and somewhere else he says that the soviet union's foreign policy was setting itself up against the rest of humankind. so it's a combination of, i think, gorbachev's true believer faith, and oftentimes true believers are the greatest apostates. this ideology was going nowhere and had no chance of going nowhere. and on the other side, it's not so much american foreign policy, although that certainly played a role, but the emergence of this global society which appeared to be irreversible, and gorbachev admits that, that led him to the

decision, well, we can stay outside it or we can join it. if we join it, we have to join it on the world's terms. we have to join the world bank, we have to join the imf. we just have to become part of it. the other comment has to do with mr. card's interpretation of events in yugoslavia, which, i think some of you may know, has been a

president's remarks are typically attributed to jet lag in which he's asked to define what the new world order is, and it just comes out a jumble. and my question is, how systematically did the administration think about the new world order and was, in fact, its thinking more coherent than was on display in that press conference? >> i think the new world order, in quotation marks, and gorbachev was the first one to use the term, that i'm aware of, but was not -- >> the 1920s. >> in this context. >> it was centuries before. >> but in this context. i don't think that it was contrived. i think it's more describing the result. so i'm not sure that the team at

the white house was looking to create a new world order. they were trying to deal with a world that has changed that represented a new world order. so i'm not sure that this was a strategic map of creating a new order. i think if it was a creative map, i think somebody would have been very involved in it and it might have been john sununu, who loved to create new solutions for problems that didn't exist. for problems that didn't exist. just kidding. >> at this point we have just a few minutes left. i have to turn to david and melani and see if you'd like to make any additional comments or press jeff on some aspects of the comments. i think for this venue he's responded very forthrightly and

constructive with his comments. have an exchange if umt. >> we have a bunch of students writing their dissertations, one thing that's fun and instructive is the genre problems of putting together a long piece. you hear jeff wrestling with this, is a presidential biography an international history? what goes on the page, what doesn't go on the page? i think trying to do three things is something disser tators -- bush and his team are wrestling with many issues at once. whether it's a paragraph here, a sentence there, you're denying your readership the ability to understand the world they faced. which is not a singular linear world

alphabetical alphabetically. write in a more argumentative linear fashion. you're writing a much broader synthesis. it's a tricky genre problem. i hear you still wrestling with that genre. >> i'd like to come back to my middle east question and push you on that a little more, what you understand the bush administration to have gone into the crisis in iraq expecting for, or preparing for in terms of the middle east policy? >> there was already good work done in the administration about what america's national security aim should be at this point. richard haas had a key role in directing and writing much of that. obviously as director for the middle east. and his -- the argument which came out of those nse documents is essentially that the united states needs to ensure there's no singular power that's dominant in the gulf. so consequently, iraq's move

south gives the fear there's actually going to be that dominant power. >> containment from the '80s? >> exactly. one of the interesting things that occurred in that nsc debate which was recently declassified are the number of people, dick cheney in particular, argue in that meeting that maybe it doesn't really mere that saddam hussein's gotten all that oil in kuwait because he's got to sell it, and we want it. so, you know, as long as he's selling it in the global market, what's the problem if it's kuwaiti oil or iraqi oil? it's a very convoluted meeting. people are throwing out ideas. it's hard to tell what's somebody's sincere thought is and what somebody's thought piece is within the meeting. even at the moment of crisis, people begin to step back and take a look at their assumptions and move forward. i'll tell you one of the most interesting things we have discovered in the new documents is just what a raw deal april glassby got if all this. as you may recall, she was u.s. ambassador to iraq.

she gets called into a -- this is a 30-second version. she gets called into a meeting with saddam hussein -- this is a very rare thing. the ambassador never gets to talk to hussein. hussein doesn't talk to people who then live. he essentially explains we have all these longstanding grievances and she say essentially, you know, we cannot comment on border disputes, and people have subsequently said that gave him a green light. the truth of the matter is i have 13 different cables from the white house and from the state department in the days leading up to that saying make sure you tell saddam hussein we don't comment on border disputes because we don't comment on border disputes. there are 3,000 border disputes around the world. if we commented on every one we of them, we'd have to stick our nose in everywhere. and she delivered the second part of the message, which always gets forgotten. which is we don't comment on border disputes but we will be against any use of force and we're always against use of force. diplomatic solutions are the way

to go. that part always gets forgotten. there's any number of cables that say this, in fact, president bush was scheduled to speak with saddam hussein by telephone the evening of the invasion, of course, the call never occurs. and the talking points prepared for him also include that language that we're not going to comment on border disputes, that's the message we're sticking with. don't use force is the next part, but i think she really gets a raw deal in this. it really demonstrates their primarily concern, it seems, is let's not have this be an issue. let's make sure the middle east is calm enough to get the oil out because the rest of the world is going on. as long as we don't have one dominant power in the middle east, that's all we really care about. i don't see much else in the national security documents with differences with the reagan administration over the middle east. >> i want to thank jeff for giving us a draft manuscript that has initiated a very rich conversation.

i want to thank the panelists for taking advantage of the opportunities in that manuscript to really conduct this terrific discussion about writing presidential history and about the administration of h.w. bush. thanks very much. >> i'm deeply grateful. thank you. go back to -- really? okay. let it play. let it play. ♪ ♪ what's that tune i hear ringing in my ear ♪ ♪ come on along, come on along ♪ it's a wonderful idea >> this is what alexander -- i made a mistake. i'll fix it. ♪ from down in dixieland

♪ when alexander takes his ragtime band to france he'll capture everyone and take them one by one ♪ ♪ those ragtime tunes ♪ they'll throw their guns away ♪ ♪ hip hip hooray and stop fighting today ♪ ♪ they'll get so excited they'll come over the top ♪ ♪ with a hip and a hop ♪ hindenburg will know he has no chance when alexander takes his ragtime band to france ♪ >> now, i came in here and rehear rehearsed, so imagine how bad it would be if i hadn't rehearsed.

that song obviously comes once we've fwoen into the war. let me -- let me fill in the pieces broadly, then as the songs come up, i'll place them for you. we get that berlin song called "let's all be americans now" which comes soon after a group of songs that were response to a specific incident. that is, what really galvanizes american patriotism. what really galvanizes american support for the allies. do you know what the event was? the sinking of "lucitania." in the months after the sichk i si sinking, there are dozens of songs about the sinking of the lucitania that have the same basic point of view. it was a dastardly thing to do. they were heartless and cruel

and we need to get back. so, and those songs, you know, whether the songs are are shaping public opinion or responding to public opinion is hard to know because they come out over a series of months. my best guess is both were happening, but clearly with the sinking of the "lusitania," everything changes and now it's just a matter of getting to the war and the events occurred, tensions build, and in we go. the song you just listened to is one of a series of songs about alexander that go back to 1911. are you with me on that one? what are we talking about? what's the important one? "alexander's ragtime band" which irvin berlin wrote in 1911, four

years after he became a songwriter, which he stumbled into. was one of the great serendipitous moments in american history. he was working in a tough bar in chinatown and ended up being told to write a song lyric. it's a whole story. but he did and realized he could make a few bucks at this. he earned 38 cents in royalties on that first song. but he learned if he could do it, he could make money. his goal was to make $25 a week so he doesn't have to sleep in allies and flophouses anymore. the song was so popular that it sold a million copies in 1911 at a time when that was very unusual and sold another million

copies in 1912 and berlin basically never had to work again, but obviously did. the song was so popular that a number of other songwriters wrote about a character named alexander that fed off "alexander's wartime band," and even into world war ii when there was a comic song called "when alexander takes his ragtime band to france." and if you were listening to, or reading the words, you heard the lyric tell you that all that had to happen was for the band to play a two-step, a ragtime song that we used to dance to, a two-step was a dance. one-step and two-step was the way you danced to ragtime songs. and they would jump up out of their trenches and go cakewalking back to germany.

if we took "alexander's ragtime band" to france, the war would be over. now, that's a joke, obviously. whether you find it funny or i find it funny is not the point, it was a joke in 1917. it also reflects the attitude toward that war as we left home to do what? to teach the kaiser a lesson. that is, we had never fought in a european war before. we really had a sanitized view of what trench warfare would be like. we had no idea. we knew that there was hoarding in this country. there's a song called "the demon has bought up all the coal." people were hoarding. there were songs about the so-called butchery of belgium by

the germans, which was to a significant degree propaganda. their behavior was not as bad as it was said to be. and so we were going off there to show kaiser bill who the doughboys were, and, of course, we got bloodied fast. but you hear that optimism, you hear that sense of ease. we'll just go over there and dance around a little bit, slap kaiser bill and come home. so the song is not only a comic take on war, which every war has produced. even world war ii, which had the fewest comic songs, we seemed to take world warcdbw"1wf2 ii more seriously. civil war gave us "gooper peas," for example, and world war ii gave us "oh how i hate to get up in the morning." there were a lot of them in world war ii. more about how it reflects

the history of an e era tonight on "american history tv" on primetime. beginning at 8:00 eastern, the entire program on world war i and music, michael lesser talks about how world war i changed american music. at 9:20, music as a catalyst for social change. musicians, staples, graham nash, discuss music, and the change of the sitright sitrights movemen. 10:35 feminism and 1960s and '70s pop music. popular music of the 1960s and 7 '70s. all the this tonight on "american history tv" primetime. with live coverage of the u.s. house on c-span and the senate on c-span2, here on c-span3, we complement that coverage by showing you the most relevant congressional hearings and public affairs events.

weekends, c-span3 is the home to "american history tv" with program that tell our nation's stories. the civil war's 150th anniversary, visiting battlefields and key events. "american artifacts,". "history bookshelf" with the best known american history writers. the president se looking at the policies and legacies of our nations and commanders in chief. lectures in history, top college professors delving into america's past. our new series, "real america" featuring archival government and educational films from the 1930s through the '70s. c-span3. created by the cable tv industry and funded by your local cable or satellite provider. watch us in hd, like us on facebook, and follow us on twitter. to mark the 25th anniversary of the fall of the berlin wall, a panel of historians discuss the end of the cold war. constructed in 1961, the wall

began to fall on november 9th, 1989. after months of protests and political liberalization in pro soviet eastern europe. this is event is hosted from c-span3's american history tv, this is just under two hours. welcome, everyone. it's wonderful to see you all here gathered at this plenary session which is basically commemorating the 25th anniversary of the fall of the berlin wall. i'm richard immerman from temple university and it is my honor and pleasure to serve as the chair and moderator. for those of us who have been coming to shafr meetings for

four decades or even more, it's a little short of remarkable that we're marking 25 years since the fall of the berlin wall. it's remarkable because on the one hand we can recall that event so vividly, but on the other hand, it sometimes seems like it took place a lifetime ago. it's also remarkable because for those of us who pursued our degrees and published our first books during the preceding decades, in some cases before the construction of the wall -- [ laughter ] -- its collapse seemed so unimaginable. in fact, if i can indulge you for a second, the year before the collapse, i organized a conference on john foster

dulles. no one was more associated with the cold war. some of you were there. there was lots of talk about the integration of europe. the soviets new thinking. glasnost. perestroika but no one was talking about the reunification of germany. this was the time john gadddes began their conferences on soviet and american relations. first time scholars got together. and scott armstrong had just come up with the idea of this thing called a national security archive. but an end to the cold war? not a chance. no discussion of it at all. consequently what's not remarkable is that we're really not much closer now than we were then to reaching a consensus on

the fundamental questions regarding the events in germany at the time and then, of course, the aftermath. these questions concerned the drivers whether they be individual, state or international. these questions concerned the consequences whether they be international, state or individual. and these questions concerned the significance, the legacy, also in terms of individual, states and international. and while we have not reached any consensus, there are none in our profession, in our guild more qualified to articulate the terms of the debate and move the conversation forward than our three speakers tonight. none of them really need any introduction. but i'll introduce them anyway. and i'll do it all at once in

order, in the order in which they will speak. which i think i can sort out now. so that we can both ensure that there's maximum time for our general conversation as well as their opening remarks. mary elise sarotte newest book "the collapse, the accidental opening of the berlin wall" will appear this autumn on the 25th anniversary of the fall of the wall. her last book which i'm sure we're all familiar with, "1989" was a "financial times" book of the year and won shafr's prize, the prize for german and european studies and as, aaa s shulman prize for distinguished scholarship on communist foreign policy. princeton university will publish an updated anniversary

edition in the autumn of 2014. so she actually gets a doubleheader. mary serves as dean professor of history of international relations at the university of southern california and currently on leave as a visiting professor of government and history at harvard. she's a former humboldt scholar, white house fellow and is a member of institute forced a vanced study at princeton and is a lifetime member of the council on foreign relations. mel leffler is a professor of american history at the university of virginia and a faculty fellow of the governing america in a global era program at uva's miller center. he's the author of several books on the cold war. and on u.s. relations with europe, including for the soul of mankind, which won the george

lewis prize from the american historical association and preponderance of power. which won the bancroft, hoover and farrell prizes. in 2002 and 2003 he was a professor at oxford. he's also held the kissinger chair at the library of congress. mel has been the recipient of fellowships from the council on foreign relations, the united states institute of peace, the woodrow wilson center, and the norwegian nobel institute and, of course, he served as president of shafr. in 2010 mel and arnie west collaborated the history of the cold war and most recently he co-edited "on certain times american foreign policy after the cold war." he's now editing, co-editing a book on comparative strategy making and writing about the foreign policy of the george w. bush administration.

our last speaker will be jeffrey engel. jeff is founding director of the center for presidential history at southern methodist university. prior to accepting that appointment, he held a post-doctoral fellowship and taught at the university of wisconsin, yale, the university of pennsylvania, haverford and texas a&m. he was the 52 professor at the bush school and the director of programming for the scowcroft institute for teaching and membership. -- mentorship. while as texas a&m he received a silver star award for teaching and mentorship, distinguished teaching award from a&m's association of former students and a university system chancellor's teaching excellence award. among the numerous articles and

books he has written or edited. he was shafr's 2012 lecturer and recipient of the norwegian nobel institute fellowship. he's currently writing "when the world seemed new, george h.w. bush" and "the surprisingly peaceful end to the cold war." mary. mary? >> thank you very much richard. thank to you the society for inviting me to speak. and also it's great that c-span is here so many more people can join us in their discussion today from their homes. of course the people here have an advantage. the society wisely gave you two free drinks before you had to start listening to me so i'm hoping that will blunt

the edge of your skeptical and penetrating questions. so i have just a few minutes to tell you a little bit about the fall of the wall, and then my colleagues will talk a little bit more about legacy and interpretation. as richard was kind enough to mention i have a book coming out on this topic in the fall and it will be the anniversary itself is november 9th. so you'll be seeing a lot of media coverage, i hope, of my book but certainly of the 25th anniversary of the fall of the wall and it's great that shafr has chosen to make this plenary session where we talk about the significance of this event. ï=i"ujájt(s difficulties. one thing that's important to me a lot of great events don't have

the first time i got that question i was kind of shocked. by the fourth or fifth time i was no longer shocked and i realized that there's not a lot in languages other than german about the short term events that brought down the berlin wall. there's a lot of excellent