to have a majority vote on whether to investigate it and they have basically deadlocked on it the last couple of years. >> that is just a short portion from the unrig the system summit in new orleans. watch it tonight starting at 8:30 eastern on cspan. the discussions included assessments of franklin d. roosevelt, jfk, george h.w. bush and bill clinton as well as their russian counter parts. this is about an hour. >> this is the second half of

this panel. we have gone to a little past 1. i just met him last evening over dinner and after dinner in which we had a fascinating conversation but two slightly different ones about whom we have been speaking and it was jacqueline kennedy and and we might save that for a later discussion but i enjoyed that conversation. he is a professor of international history at the london school of economics. he's an expert on the cold war and soviet russian history and particularly intellectual history. among his books is particularly related to our topic of this conference, a failed empire. the soviet union and the cold war and i also noted among his books, and having just watched the movie yet again, i was drawn

of course to that topic. >> he is a long time friend of the miller center and we're always happy to welcome him back as we did recently for an american forum on his latest book the impossible presidency which in light of the incumbent might be called the impossible president but it's called the impossible presidency and of course it's about whether anyone now can be a successful president. germmy is the distinguished chair for leadership and global affairs at the university of texas and he is based at the department of history and the school of public affairs. so i'm going to turn to vlad first who will speak to us about his essay all of a sudden came

up with an idea and it succeeded at least for awhile in that enterprise. he is the last person as we heard so much from team, the person who represents heroic tradition that is by the existing capitalist system and believes in the revolution and all of that. he wrote a beautiful biography of him. but if you ask yourself why

there was only one in the history of the cold war, there were no imitators before him and certainly there were no willing imitators after him which is easier to understand. you come up with a picture of soviet foreign policy where most of people even stalling at many points of his career and cert n certainly people after his death begin to search for some kind of soviet-american or conceptual system structure that would accommodate both soviet and american interests so that makes him a colorful but only an

episode, heroic episode in this search for accommodation between the two great powers. and whatever he did was quite awful. especially in foreign policy and it was just as a reaction to his risk taking and kept repeating that he brought himself to the brink. it was not a peace idea but it was deeply held by the idea that if you have two great powers, they're big. they have nuclear weapons. they can destroy each other. what prevents them from reaching some kind of an agreement to stabilize, to build a stable

one. so it's logical that sooner or later that should happen. the only problem is that some people in the united states, something on the american side prevents this idea from being realized and then all of a sudden he finds a partner with whom he can negotiate and reach results and also to negotiate from a position of strength because he does believe in strength. a very goodyear because he just managed to deal with a huge crisis in europe and he says, have we not invaded them?

and then of course neither would soon end up immediately on our western borders. so he's a more normal soviet man to me. they are many more in the soviet establishment. it is pretty unique if you think about it. however, you begin to realize it hit it's limitations, in a few years. it's definitely by 1975, everyone understands something went wrong. this is not only that, this is many other things piling up. my argument is very, very

simple. the idea of huge number of soviet communist official that there could be some inevitable conceptual frame work where the two powers would form a stable world order and was based on fundamental misperception of what america is about and how america wanted to build the world with u.s. leadership and only u.s. leadership. so when russia meets, already half drunk in the watergate stage, that's in crimea and at the last meeting he raises a toast to the doctrine of lasting and universal peace. that's a joke. but there's something deeper behind this joke. so i would argue that he could never fully realize that a u.s.

soviet world order is one. they never wanted to create such a world order. they wanted to prevail in the cold war and the united states did offer strategic alliance to a big communist country but it was china. and it's strategically directed against the soviet union. now moving to putin. putin is a very different person but also a very different person in comparison. there's some differences. let's go through them. he supports military.

he promotes it. to reduce putin to a kgb man, is deeply wrong. he had a steep learning curve. he learned a lot. what does it mean when the state is destroyed and russia was flooded by highly unpleasant realities linked to political and economic liberalization. so he accepted fundamental failure his project is to improve russia's place in the existing word order and not to create a new one. and if you talk to very knowledgeable russians even they

don't understand why russia cannot find a proper place for itself in the world. sometimes russia acts as if it's a super power but everyone understands that russia cannot be a super power for economic and other reasons. and then russia refuses to act as a regional power because it's diminishing and decubitus rogatory. russia is somewhere. the relationship of russia is not an easy thing to establish and just in terms of provoking a discussi discussion, i would argue on one hand the entire stability of putin's regime depends on stability and export import relationship it proved how good

this was for russia considering the wealth of raw materials. it's a wonderful decision but not enough. you come to the idea of constant forces coming from the east and of course from china as well threatening to chip away what you considered to be your backyard. what you consider to be your own buffer zone in the system where putin is the king, it's up, everything is absolutely interdependent. if you yield on the foreign front, all of your rifles say uh-huh, you're weak. so putin cannot afford to be weak. when he has to show flexibility

he just took crimea, he must compensate for that apparent sign of weakness by doing something else. he cannot just stay a idle and not respond. he must produce action. that's part of the regime that he is as hostage of as the creator of. dealing with the system itself and structural limitations and putin's own psyche this is the country that is fundamentally different from the soviet union. he was responsible for communist

empire. that he had to maintain. putin can choose more or less where to intervene and how far to go. russia is smaller than the economy. putin did not inherit the completely failed economic model. he still employees economists that provide stability when shrinking even under the condition of sanctions. so this is a flexibility he could not dream of. very conservative and very cautious when it came to the budget and the control of the state bank but had no idea how to do when you have a major crisis, falling oil prices and

all of that. putin knows how to react to volatility and that's strength. in terms of propaganda, propaganda was a joke. it was a joke for us, soviet citizens. the propaganda mean that everything that the soviets saw propaganda says you have to turn upside down and this is the truth. not even possibly dream of with all of my respect, it's a very successful enterprise and russian operations in social networks using american platforms like facebook and twitter and others is phenomenal. it's a phenomenal achievement. so to overestimate putin's strength, no, of course. we know that russia is weak and getting weaker but underestimate

putin is also a wrong thing and say, well, let it go down and the united states can ignore it. it's, you know, we cannot. we cannot ignore it. finally let me conclude with an optimistic note. crimea is an exception. putin does not need more territory if only because more people come with the territory and you have to feed them and give pensions. he doesn't like it. putin's strategy was and is a confrontation with the west. the problem is the american side does not want to provide that information. perhaps for putin it was as much of a grand illusion.

>> thank you for that. >> we'll turn to jeremy whose essay is on nixon. >> i want to say how delighted i am to be up here. i have use sod much of the work from the presidential studies project here at the miller center. it's one of the most important things that not just the miller center does but they have done for the last decade and so. and i know my graduate students will benefit from it. i want to tell everyone how influenced i have been by his work. he does what almost no other historian does which is to not simply tell the story but context within the frame work writing about the role of soviet leaders but also soviet citizens like himself as referred to the

book before. that's my point of departure because one of the problems is first of all i don't know what it is. very hard to define and there's a tendency we have to describe it in hyper eletist terms and not understanding the context in which this takes place on both sides and the reason why it's an enduring transformation of course. there's the speech i quote in the paper. i'm going to read it to get started but not read anything else. i want to give us a frame work for what we're talking about. nixon explained this is at the height of watergate. a blend of the ideal and the pragmatic has been critical in our approach to the soviet union. the differences between our two systems of life and government

are sharp and fundamental. but even as we oppose totalitarianism we much keep up with the age. each confrontation has meant a brush with nuclear devation to all civilized nations. reduction of tensions has become the foremost requirement of american foreign policy. i think they came to this thinking independently. they both believed that the global order that had benefitted the united states so much since world war ii was diminishing in it's benefits to the united states. it overstates it to say they thought it was completely crumbling but they thought that the trends in the global world

system were moving against them. they saw a crisis of the old order and acutely felt it at home. this is the story of the electoral career in the 1960s and the story of what actually got him elected was in large part the crisis of american politics in 1968. it's not just the 2016 election where a candidate draws an inside straight to get elected that happened there as well. if you ran it five more times nixon would not win it more than one or two other times. that could go so many different ways. perhaps as we're learning, thanks to the research being done perhaps a little less interference in the negotiations over vietnam and perhaps that comes out differently. nixon was acutely conscious of how precarious his power was at

home and he believed, i think and this comes through in all of his writings that establishing overseas was crucial for his longevity at home. i wrote a whole book arguing this and i keep writing more evidence to reinforce that. it's the role of the individual and those and a few others must play in controlling this decline, in holding back it's actually quite pedestrian that the silent majority has been silenced. the elite are tablging us in the wrong direction and i must stand up and push things in the

direction they should go and perhaps that the leaders of the soviet union and china themselves not respected by perhaps their own elites in their own soepts might follow along as well. there's a hyperpersonalization of the understanding of foreign policy by nixon and those around him. the centralization of power in the white house. the use of secrecy. that's not domestic politics. that's the mirror image of the view of the international system. richard nixon is acutely aware of the fact that the last person to manage it was franklin roosevelt and that he did it in a very personalistic way. many things he has written about nixon recognized himself. if eisenhower was his first model for thinking about diplomacy, roosevelt was his

model and from the beginning he placed his emphasis on doing what presidents in the cold war had not done before. seeking to meet with the soviets even when there's not an agreed agenda. the only presidential trip that i know of where there isn't an agenda when you get on the ground when the president arrives. he doesn't know when he's going to meet or what's going to happen. no one would staff the president that way today. he doesn't go quite to that extent with the soviets. but there's a similar desire to sit down and talk things through man-to-man and that phrase turns up time and again the elites are going to sit down and figure things out. nixon meets with his soviet counter part more times in his relatively short presidency than throughout the entire decade

before. so they each have one meeting with a soviet counter part. his meetings are much more extensive and much more focused on personal relations. and there's an emphasis and this is very important upon negotiation and again in what nixon sees as roosevelt terms that everything is negotiable and that you can make trade offs. he gives us the fancy terminology linkage but i think that anybody that recognizes this is the trading that goes on in any negotiation. this drives them batty because they have figured out the way to talk about it and the technical stuff doesn't matter. it's all politics. it's all politics so they disregard smith and all the others that have come to them and spent years thinking this

through. it's also a belief and it's all politics and all about making trade offs. that's what salt is. that's what the abm treaty is. there's a effort to use these negotiations and personal relationships to then build a structure for stability. not the other way around. not the other way around. there's a distrust in the structural factors and trends and desire to use the individuals to redefine those trends and again he can give the very sort of german romantic sensibility that you're standing out and redefining. it's about trying to redefine the pressures around you by building personal relationships as a foundation for new structure agreements. that's why you had the agreement in 1972. that's why you have the discussions that occupy much of their time about what a stable world order system should look

like and they can be managed better if you have more common knowledge. we respect each other and recognize what we know on both sides. common knowledge. understandings. years ago i did a word search on the documents and the word understanding comes up more often than anything else. we have to build understandings. to understand intentions and the rules of the game and create a stability based upon a common knowledge set for operating as a society. i would argue that to some extent what nixon does is actually successful i'm with many scholars you can't

understand that without understanding this period and the ways in which these personal relations broke down some of the barriers to contact between societies. the exchanges that arise, he has written about this in the field of international relations not to fundamental agreements on ideology give legitimacy, give cover to those that have long wanted to communicate across societies. we do have a more stable world. wouldn't it be nice if our president today, if we had a sense of what his common knowledge of nuclear weapons was. wouldn't that make the world a more stable place. because we think we know what we know and policy makers should

know what we know. there's a sense of strategic stability and a new connection that i think is build during this period that has enormous enduring value. i put out there and i read bill's biography saying this and he may disagree. where else is he going to have the opportunity to travel like he does. spend time in canada. hate the united states but see canadian social democracy and scandinavian social democracy as an alternative. they matter enormously and matter for american societies as well. it's much improved because of the exchanges that arise in the 1970s. that said, those successes come with many failures that have to do less with individuals.

it's the deep thought and ability to pursue risky but important initiatives. their weaknesses are all the same thing. they don't know how to operate effectively in institutions. i would even call them at times institution disruptors and they systematically undermine consensus for everything they do every step of the way wins over people on the other side. every step of the way. on the u.s. side it's not brought into the american policy system. the pentagon and the state department are pursuing entirely different sets of policies at the same time that the white house is pursuing a devoted policy and that's by design and that's never reconciled.

henry jackson just takes advantage of that he just sees it and takes advantage of it. it's depending on few people and when those people leave the scene, it's very hard to continue. it's very hard to keep it going. this is the roosevelt to true man problem as well. and most deeply of all and perhaps the most important for us today, it is not, the policy is not connected to american values. it's actually marketed, discussed, pursued as an alternative to american values. in fact, there's a deep self-criticism of the united states built into it. they believe americans don't understand the world, never will understand the world and should just let them do it. that is unsellable as policy in the united states in the long run. what effective policy needs, i

don't think i have much to offer in how to understand putin. we're all making this up, right? and it's actually a point that i want to build on. the importance of having institutional gravity behind what you do. they have been uncertain and inconsistent. did we reset with russia? did we not? and a set of priorities that can back up the policies that you're pursuing is essential. the point of my most recent book

is the presidents take on policy implementing themselves and it never works. it never works. so we are doing the wrong things today. i want to be on wrong on that. without saying a word about donald trump. we're doing the wrong things today. we need more diplomats. not less. we need more diplomats, not less. we need more area experts. not less and we need to be talking more. not less and i don't mean at the presidential or white house level. let me make this as clear as i can. there is no substitute for that. it failed on the american side because it lacked that and anything we're doing is going to fail regardless of what putin does until we actually build

that structure so we have a lot to offer on how we should think about that. thank you. you were making notes. anything to say before we open up to questions? >> no, let's open. >> okay. let's do. >> we have one here in the middle and. >> the soviet/russian leaders have longevity in the office that the american counter parts normally don't have and when you

look it's nixon and kartder and they somehow got lost in our story and my question is about the fate and the favor and to what degree in american policy and stroke really contributed to that. the question is about the importance of personalities in that story. how much emphasis you would put on personalities. >> that brings us to structural factors. he had nixon that was an ideal

american president in soviet imagination. everything is run and everything is secretive and everything is decided through back channel. u.s. secretary of state doesn't even know about this back channel. it's perfect. perfect way how you can run business in soviet imagination. so that couldn't last obviously and he ran out of luck even before he had a stroke or whatever he had. illness. he's the first president that listens and has no imagination, power or energy to do anything and goes back and says no, i'll no longer use that word by the

way but also as i interview participants he reacted very, very quickly to opportunities. he was a very astute politician that if he saw that it's something to do with west germany, he would go there he was not a risk taker. stalin liked to do things when everything was prepared and assured. he wouldn't take risk. so when he was sick he also couldn't see any opportunities for himself. if he had one, he would have

grabbed them. unfortunately carter's idea as we know in 1977 was a little bit misguided to renegotiate and all went through numerous discussions about it. it was very, very unfortunate that americans change that position and this is something also they couldn't materialize. every administration starts from scratch. it's a mess. you have to wait for a year and then at the end of the second year the first administration have a good chance they would understand something and then there's a very small window to do something with americans and then the next president starts and it's hopeless. i hear the pain of soviet democrat whens the first ambassador to the united states is sad when famous comparison, japan was like a chamber orchestra that's a very generous

image about the united states betraying his classical education. but they're continuously baffled by how americans do their foreign policy and denied american ability to do foreign policy whatsoever. >> i found it very interesting and thought provoking the comparison vlad made between when he said was the illusion or dill lu

dilusion about the world order and then you compare the two putin's illusion or delusion in the beginning of the administration. i never thought about it this way but can i, this is really interesting because maybe putin also sincerely believed that a truly cooperative order was possible. world order. now can i push you just a little more to the moment that starts to disapate and why and try to make the same comparison? this is not a question about personalities. this is about their vision of how world order might work and why it does not work this way. >> well, we all know this history.

after 9/11 putin calls bush and offers all kinds of things and he definitely acts at the time when there's already, how strong, i don't know but when there's already an anti-american consensus in moscow and even among diplomats and putin overrules that. so that's the role of an individual and he overrules it apparently in his belief that yeah, heroic factor is important as long as i reach out to american leader, our friendship would become the basis for the future partnership and i'm quoting from your paper. if we're friends, that's the best basis for partnership and it never happens. it never happens.

it's a grand illusion because there's forces that the soviets and russians are incapable of understanding. moreover, even scholars are incapable of understanding those obstacles. but then it becomes the whole path of failures. you still ask the question, why failure? maybe the conclusion should be like in a good science. it was not a good failure. it was a pattern and then of course i think it was iraq. i think it was iraq when, instead of doing what, instead of listening to the russian concerns about the bush administration walks out and invades iraq and those two things had huge impact on moscow

foreign policy. huge impact. >> i was just going to say on the american side i think there's an interesting pattern of also delusion and disillusionment. they overstate their ability to persuade a foreign leader. it's what makes george h.w. bush so interesting because he was so modest about his ability to do that. but generally presidents, from kennedy forward, i think. i would even think perhaps eisenhower. presidents have a tendency to believe they can persuade their foreign adversaries and if they can persuade them and still do what they want to do. so i can build a relationship with you but yet go ahead and do what i'm doing in other parts of the world that undermine russian

interest and because we're friends they can manage all of these things, right? the problem is that of course foreign leaders are not persuaded as easily as we think they are and they pay close attention to what we do outside of our personal relationship with them. it takes a long time for presidents to do that. >> i think that the very good discussion is actually not generous enough to soviet foreign policy. germany made the point that we would do better if we built up our institutions and do high quality policy work. i know of no period in which almost any government in the post war era did a better job of institutional high quality policy staff work than the soviet government in the 1970s. this is not so much about him. this is now the people like you

look at the skill, just to take for example, the americans, we haven't talked much about vietnam. the americans in this period are totally ham strung by their position on vietnam and their need in every negotiation to try to get the soviets to try to help them manage their vietnam problem and his team managed that issue about, frankly, if you look back on it, could they have managed it any better? if you kind of -- if you ask yourself what were their purpos purposes, and how did they want to skillfully manage this and get to what outcomes, could they have done any better than they did? and then if you could go from region to region to region and according to the objectives that they had it's really quite a remarkable performance and sometimes you could notice beneath putin and maybe including putin, russian foreign

policy over the last few years has actually developed and implemented rather skillfully composed plans that outmaneuvered their rivals in ways that we might not like. like the move into syria, there's months of sophisticated staff work involved with both the syrians and the iranians that's a prelude to what the americans begin seeing in 2015. the stuff with crimea and ukraine happen on a 24 hour impulse with no advanced plan. so i just invite you a little bit, vlad, it's not so much an attack but to step back and observe in a way moscow foreign policy in a right more flattering than you get from

focussing on the supreme leader. one was a bad sociology approach that was surprisingly present even though let's say in the early 80s considered to be completely obsolete but of course the approach that was a pyramid of power and all kinds that fight for influence and money and groups of capitalists and the soviet incarnation of it. so i guess the opposite, the

opposite viewpoint and quite linked to what jeremy and i have discussed about individuals was the point that i discovered and his younger proteges told me right away, my mind was quite clouded by that when it came that just throw out all of this rubbish. everything is about individuals. everything is about personal diplomatic and culture relations. we need to have more exchanges. we need to have more exhibitions, american-soviet exhibitions. more schools dealing with stereotypes and how to overcome and measures how to reduce tensions and how to provide understa understanding that we completely

and have been invented and succeed in a tact car length y it was the approach of good professionals and sometimes a agree with you, we're too harsh on them we sort of buy the criticism of this group that come from the kgb and called all of those people slightly dumbed down. it's not true and i agree that was a very very structure school

that maybe didn't allow that was a good reason. didn't allow a room for heroic foreign policy but they were sort of fail proof set of rules that they followed that provided slow and gradual advance in all chosen direction. they wanted something heroic. they wanted something quick. and warned of possible consequences. >> i am reminded of my new book

on this area. on this era for the age of my students really hate that and and righted it. on this issue of staffing so the people do not change. they are very professional and very good and capable of a lot of very good thinking. what changes is in terms of the leadership. the leadership weakens very dramatically. this goes back to the point as well. it has to do with aging and health and a lot of things that happen and that's the period in the late 1970s and is what i see

is the best staffing in the world could not have dealt with it because there's a vacuum at the top. there's an inability to translate all of those abilities and diplomatic terms and intelligence terms. over to a strategic long-term set of actions that can only be created by that. >> just a fun point of information this is a great panel. we do have one taped summit. there's only one u.s. soviet summit for which we have a recording and that's the 1973 summit. if you want to hear them talking

to each other we have that on tape. five years ago they released it. it's very interesting and i think it shows it to be extraordinarily weak and i think that you'll also find that these meetings are different from the takes. there's no tape that we know of vienna but we do have one taped summit so it's worth listening to if you want to get a sense of the relationship. >> there are questions.

yes. >> just a very quick question because i largely agree with the idea that the more understanding between leaders and bureaucracies is international relations. i'm a big believer in that, but there's all this tension where i come from in international relations, the problem of deception and that is that you can obviously want to communicate. you can communicate with that smile and that friendship and build those personal relationships, but if the person is trying to deceive you, you have to be very wary of that, and of course, the ultimate example is when bush, second bush said that i looked into putin's soul, and i liked what i saw and i understand the man. obviously that was a pure deception. it reminds me of the woody allen that he failed first year of

philosophy because he looked into the soul of the final exam. you can't do that. you can't look into the other person and see their true intensions and you might be deceived. so i'm wondering how u.s. historians would grapple with this age-old problem in my field of how do you deal with that tension between trying to understand one another and also deal with the problem of deception? >> so it's a great question and it connects to arna and tim's point, as well. i think the policymakers who get their adversary and their allies who understand the other side. they come through it through a combination of two root, right? one is they come to it from their personal impressions, but they also come to it from having a vigorous process around them that is providing contextual knowledge and forcing them to think that through and that is what i would call a good process, right? you don't just read the cia psychological profile and go by that and you combine that with

your information. it's how you process it and i do think franklin roosevelt is a master at this, and he's spending a lot of time with stalin and churchill and he has multiple people who are working with him who are want working with each other and he's actually using that information as he's planning moment to moment. the problem with roosevelt's process is that it takes an enormous amount of energy by him, by he, the president, and that's one of the reasons why he dies so much younger than churchill and stalin. by the way, frank didn't say this, but one of the important insights in any paper for this conference was that if franklin roosevelt lived as george canon franklin roosevelt would have been alive in '83. that is hard to imagine in part because of the way he manage d s his leadership. >> i don't know, i do think that this is the limit for -- for --

a limit, there is a limit for how much we can understand for our interlocutor. is he a partner? do i need hem for my policy and a certain policy framework? or is he an adversary? so if this is stalin in 1945 and roosevelt needed him, he hoped to use stalin as a post-war partner for creating a post-war order. he knows stalin is capable of infinite deception, but that does not matter as much as it would if you're truman and begin to city stalin as an adversary and then your optic completely

flips and then deception becomes a justification for a complete mistrust, and this is the -- and this is really striking how, in particularly in u.s. foreign policy, both particularly during the cold war how much more tolerant are american diplomats and policymakers toward people and who they perceive to be their allies or the useful sum of the beach category and their adversary. so a compromise stops at the door of at the border of the soviet union. understanding stops, empathy stops at the border and at the doorstep of the kremlin and so on and so forth. there are some remarkable exceptions and there's one remarkable exception is breshnev and nixon. it's remarkable and nobody could predicted. breshnev takes him aside and

basically abducts him to the horror of his -- entourage and takes him to whoever is translating and all of a sudden they begin to feel like they're both intensely insecure individuals and both have enormous power and yet they can trust each other. >> right. right. >> and it's a miracle. >> i think that i just wanted to add if i could, just to build on vlad's nailed it. i think what's so important is for a leader to develop a complex portrait of his or her interlocutors and educate the american public and our rhetoric at home has always been simplistic and it's become even more simplistic and it happened to obama as much as it happened to others as you get locked into your political rhetoric at home more so than ever before. that is one of the things that's still extraordinary to me about ronald reagan that he could walk past that, that he could create

an evil empire image and then actually sell another image of gorbachev. that might be more important than his strategic thinking and his ability to sell that image. we understate the importance of that when we think about policy making, but i would include that in philip's staffing, when you are staffing foreign policy it's also how you're selling foreign policy at home. >> we must draw this wonderful panel to an end. thank you so much. let's give a big round of applause to our panelists. [ applause ] here's what's ahead. up next we have more about u.s.-soviet relations with a look at how presidents reagan and george h.w. bush interacted with mikhail gorbachev and then the working relationship between presidents george h.w. bush, bill clinton and russian leader boris yeltsin. after that, it's a discussion on

president kennedy and nikita khrushchev. join us tonight for american history tv in prime time. we'll continue our look at the relationship between u.s. and soviet union leaders at the height of the cold war from the university of virginia's miller center. you can see american history tv in prime time starting at 8:00 p.m. eastern here on c-span3. also coming up on the c-span networks, join us later today when new america in washington, d.c., hosts a panel discussion on the influence of politics on race relations. live coverage this afternoon starts at 4:30 p.m. eastern on c-span. and later, the white house correspondents association hosts a discussion with white house press secretary sarah sanders and former white house press secretary mike mccurry. that will be followed by a panel of discussion with white house correspondents. live coverage starts at 7:00 p.m. eastern also on c-span. c-span where history unfolds

daily. in 1979 c-span was created as a public service by america's cable television companies and today we continue to bring you unfiltered coverage of congress, the white house, the supreme court and public policy, vents in washington, d.c., and around the country. c-span is brought to you by your cable or satellite provider. join us tonight on c-span for portions of the first unrig the system summit from new orleans. the, vent focusing on issues such as campaign finance and the electoral college and redistricting. speakers include actress jennifer lawrence interviewing former federal election commission chair trevor potter regarding the relationship between super pacs and political candidates. here is a preview. >> okay. so if there's a wall between candidates and super pacs, then if i as a political donor throw

big money as a super pac my personal politician does not get to decide how it's spent, right? >> well, that is technically correct except that the people who do decide how to spend it are usually in the scenario, the former campaign manager of the candidate or close friends of the candidate and one of my favorite example, it was actually the parents of the candidate who are running the super pac. so it's -- they also can share what are called common vendors so they can use the same consult apartments, so basically, i think it's useful to see it as the other pocket on the candidate's coat. >> okay, but if a candidate tells the super pac exactly what to do with the money -- that's legal? >> that would be illegal. >> okay. >> however, first they have to get caught, and then the fec has

to have a majority vote on whether to investigate it and as you may have heard the fec has basically deadlocked on all of this in the last couple of years. and just a short portion from the first unrig the system summit from new orleans. watch it in its entirety tonight at 8:30 eastern on c-span. and now former national security adviser to george h.w. bush philip zellecco, mikhail gorbachev and william totman and former secretary of state for george h.w. bush all discuss the relationships between president reagan and mikhail gorbachev as well as the relationship between george h.w. bush and mr. gorbachev. this is about an hour and 15 minutes. we have a great panel and