one was mac bundy. one was dean rusk. secretary of state. he said to clay, you shouldn t react to everything that the soviets and east germans do. you should only react when they affect our vital interest. nobody who exactly what that meant. in any case, clay did not listen to him. the british prime minister, harold mcmillan who wanted us out of berlin and told kennedy that, called clay a senile and bitter old ass, which was not exactly a term of endearment. but which reflected the british policy. i wonder whether the documents that you re releasing shows some of this because the british attitude was different from clay s. checkpoint charlie. on october 22nd, when alan leitner went into east berlin to watch the opera he was stopped by the east germans who demanded additional identification, which he wouldn t show. clay was notified. he sent a squad of soldiers. escorted him in and out because american soldiers could go through the checkpoint. east germans had no authority to
you can see there, west berlin is pail white. east berlin is matching the contours of east germany and the checkpoint charlie which i ll talk about and then, of course, the other checkpoint bravo with which we use only one time in this particular exercise. the berlin crisis began in 1958, when krusef said sign a peace treaty for berlin and germany and 5u8 the rights that the allies have enjoyed will pass to the gdr, the german democratic republic because they re the ones who are suffering in berlin and what he called the gdr. and if they do not agree, if the allies do not agree to sign that then i will sign the treaty with the gdr and they can impose their rules on whoever wants to come into berlin. this was a direct challenge. it created a lot of commotion in the west. it created conferences, one particular conference between eisenhower and this kruskhev but he got to a lot of other places besides disneyland and between eisenhower and the others they held him back for a whil
voices, so many books. is she the only child that you have? in a way the only way. in another way i have thousands of children all over the world. she came a little late in life for you, didn t she? not for me. i m just beginning to live. when i m 100 years old, come visit me and i ll tell you more storie stories. and are you going to stay here you think for the rest of your life? i couldn t say at the moment. but i would love to. i love paris. i love the bookshop and it s such a great opportunity to meet diverse people and it s a fantastic place. i love acting and the shop is a theater in itself. does the store now make money every year? the store well, i mean, my father knows more about that than i do. i mean, it seems it s kept going for 50 years which is quite amazing in a way because it s run quite haphazardly. it probably is it. it s a wonderful position opposite notre dame but there s also a lot of problems here that need to be fixed and organized.
derek leebaert, author of magic and mayhem, where did you get that title? because i approached the problem, the delusions of american foreign policy, with the perspective that it results from magical thinking and results in a lot of chaos. when did you start thinking about the need for this kind of a book? i ve been in this field for a long time, really since a young academic in the mid 1970 s in harvard. and a lot of the illusions have percolated over the decades, the way that american academics, political appointees, many of us keep winging it when we influence, try to shape, indeed your first sentence is i ll go on just a little bit. have we done any right? of course we ve done a lot right. we unambiguously won the cold war, albeit with a lot of fits and starts along the way. we created and shaped the post world war ii economic order. we have performed well in the gulf war in 1991, in the balkans later in the decade. but by and large, if one looks back over
have we done any right? of course we ve done a lot right. we unambiguously won the cold war, albeit with a lot of fits and starts along the way. we created and shaped the post world war ii economic order. we have performed well in the gulf war in 1991, in the balkans later in the decade. but by and large, if one looks back over the last lifetime of foreign policymaking, it s been a pretty dismal record. i d argue even that we have lost three, if not four wars in a row the korean war in that fight with china, vietnam to be sure, iraq, which is exceedingly difficult to define as a victory in any sense, and now the deepening entanglement in afghanistan. when one has this background of dismal results in wartime, let alone in off again, on again, often illusional with the soviet union, until we finally defeated them yes, i d say that s a despairing record. what do you do fulltime to make a living? i m a management consultant. what does that mean? it means i work for