he took a yellow pad and drafted a letter to leonid brezhnev, the hea of the soviet union at the time one of the things we discovered in our research was this handwritten draft which was -- has never before been found. we were really thilled to find that draft. he wrote that draft and dick allen had it typed up, his national security advisor, at d.n.c. and tried to combine it with the state department draft but the president was not satisfied. this is an example of what marty was saying, that he imposed his own policies on the government. he didn't let -- i mean he decided what he wanted to do. and in the end, the draft from the state department was not combined with the president's draft. rather, the president wrote his own letter to brezhnev by hand and put it on top of the state department draft which also was typed and he also signed, and the letters were delivered via the soviet embassy and they got two letters, one handwritten which was very much like he -- what he drafted in the sol airium, and -- solarium and one typed. he made a couple points in the letter, two points he ofte

/soviet summit meetings from '72 to 1991, except for the carter/brezhnev meeting in vienna in 1979. his books include "reagan and gorbachev, how the cold war ended" and he's a professor at columbia. i would like to welcome back leslie staal, our moderator. prior to joining "60 minutes," she served as cbs news white house correspondent and was a moderator on "face the nation" and co-anchor of "america tonight." i would also like to recognize our blogger this evening, another inspired idea from harrold newman, david andleman and thank him for joining us. before we begin, please make sure that anything electronic that might make a noise is switched off. and please joining me in welcoming our guests. thank you. [ applause ] >> hello, everyone. if you want to know about the cold war, this is the panel to tell us. and i myself can't wait to hear them disagree with each other. it's going to be the goal. so i'm just going to plunge right in and i'm going to start with richard reeves at the end and ask him whether he thinks that ronald reagan was the reason the cold war ended. if not ronald

i can already see an air disaster if brezhnev does nixon a favor. i call upstairs to sam dash, i say sam, sam, i've got to come up and talk to you. he said, what do you have that's so exciting? it can wait. i've got -- either a birthday or anniversary. i've got to the leave now. so i blurted out, sam, nixon taped all this conversations. oh. well, come on up. even then, only spent about five minutes because he was so worried, his wife was a formidable force and she was concerned about him being home because she hadn't seen a lot of him. he got this down, called -- i don't think he could reach -- he called rufus edmondson, the closest aide. then i began the process of trying to find out who knew about it, called al long, the secret serviceman who by this point had gone to the supreme court as the chief clerk at the supreme court. so i was calling him at the supreme court to find out his version of it. he's actually started to talk to us and said to confer back to secret service. i was try to track down higbee and a fellow called steve ball, but to get

almost immediately after john's testimony, where two more people had to testify, because leonid brezhnev, the premier of the soviet union was coming to the united states, big date, hot meeting and you couldn't have watergate going on during that period. well, this gave us a little bit of a reprieve. a little respite. just before that, we said, this is not the way to investigate. i'm serious when i say the law, the criminal process in particular, but even the law when it applied to, in the senate context. you can't just go around questioning people under oath. you're not going to get the truth. you have to go work around the edges. one of the things we found out, there were all of these invisible people in the white house, and the invisible people to some extent were the lower level staff but particularly women. we didn't have any women professional staff members at the time. the white house didn't have very many, scarlett hills, i can't leeb th remember who they might have had. >> the secretarial staff. >> the secretarial staff. talk about sexism, like the remarks made last night. it was

meeting i knew that he insisted on small talk so there was a thing in "los angeles times" about brezhnev so i mentioned this and nixon immediately says i wouldn't want to be a russian leader. they never know when they are being taped. it was a wonderful dramatic irony but he wasn't really aware. so there was always through all with the time came for small talk it was always a challenge and people would contact me and there was a very -- someone contacted me and when he was president he had gone to a camp and the men and their wives and the children gathered and this particular guy was there with his daughter and not his wife who was working. it just so happened that richard nixon stopped in front of him and said to this guy are you this will rules mother? and you are talking to the president of the united states you don't want to contract but you're the father not the mother and regard this as anything else, he says no, mr. president, i am in fact her father and nixon says of course you are and slapped him right in the face and apparently the press, tv and radio and the press tried to wo

and we went into an agony of in decisions agonizing whether or not we could cause such offense to brezhnev and the soviet union by receiving such a controversial anti-communist writer. there was the opposite of the story. i thought reading about the handling was the opposite. the real list of view into the traditional american foreign policy review of such incident was to haul him out of sight and out of the embassy, make the problem go away. we should never make something like that our problem. the problem is for the government that represses human-rights to such a degree of an individual constitutes a national security problem. here's another story. from the 1980's poland friend of mine in the underground gets on and smuggles himself on a freighter across the baltics and in the middle of the baltic the ship starts to turn around are the on to me? yeah they are on to him then he turns off and goes far than the plants in sweden and the bureau is debating his fate and whether they should push back if the bureau is discussing my miserable fate they are finished and he's telling me the storie