Transcripts For CSPAN3 Politics Public Policy Today 2014082

might expect to help them. but then the side effects of the radiation will be the side effects of the cancer, and the department of defense wasn't particularly interested in the effects of radiation on people with metastatic cancer, they wanted to know what the effects of radiation were on a healthy 23-year-old pilot. and that could be best studied by irradiating people whose karch cancers were not going to respond to the radiation. most of the patients who were irradiated were poor. most of the patients who were irradiated were african-american. all of them had cancer. some of them weren't all that sick. some of them were still ambulatory, some of them were still going to work. the radiation had some pretty serious effects. out of the 90 people who were irradiated, 21 of them were dead within a month. and here's what's -- there are many things bothersome about this. we know that when you irradiate people, they have side effects. you can get nauseated, you can get very nauseated. but the department of defense didn't want the patients to be given medicines to reduce the nausea because they wanted to know what the effects would be without the medicine to reduce the nausea. in fact, they didn't even want the patients to be informed the nausea might be a side effect, because that might influence them to get nauseated, so these patients were not given basic medicines that were given to other people at the time to help prevent the side effects of radiation. these experiments, as i say, ended in 1972. 1972 is a day you'll remember. that's when the tuskegee experiments became public. we'll move on in a second to radiation experiments on children. any questions about these radiation experiments? the question was, was this done with prior informed consent? this is a good question, and it raises all sorts of issues. not to play word games, but the question, what is meant by informed consent? and the notion of informed consent as we now understand it really hadn't been fully articulat articulated, that will there is the court case with shomberg hospital where a patient has the right to decide what happens to his or her own body. the memo that i showed you earlier for the gonorrhea experiment showed that in 1992, the head of research thought informed consent was absolutely essential. clearly that was not being followed here. we'll talk about sources in a little bit, but one of the questions is, how do you know somebody had informed consent? some of the physicians claim they got informed consent, but there is not documentary evidence of it. there was a lawsuit, by the way, and as a result there is a plaque that now sits in the hospital in cincinnati. other questions? all right. the walter e. ferdinand school in boston. research funded by the national institutes of health, and quaker oats. this was an experiment on breakfast food. children were given breakfast food with irradiated calcium to see how that would be absorbed. quaker wanted to get a leg up on cream of wheat. they wanted to be able to show that their cereals were better absorbed and better spread throughout the body. i'm not making this up. how did they get them to do this? here's an excerpt from a letter. a letter to parents, 1953. we have done some examinations in connection with the nutritional department in the massachusetts institute of technology with the purpose of helping to improve the nutrition of our children. i want to point out that just like we saw, if you remember, in some of the letters in the tuskegee experiments, asking a man to come in for a spinal function, and you had in the letter institutions like the tuskegee institute. here the national institute of technology, a very well-respected, highly regarded institution. the blood samples are taken after one test meal which consists of a special breakfast containing a certain amount of calcium. if you sign up for this, you get to be a member of the science club. and if you're a member of the science club, you get additional privileges. you get a quart of milk daily, you get to go to a baseball game and to the beach. nothing in here that says we're going to give you radioactive pricers. this raises all sorts of questions similar to the one we talked about with the willowbrook experience. the willowbrook experience was also funded by the military. the armed forces were interested in a vaccine and that's why they conducted some of those experiments. this raises questions. first of all, can children give informed consent? are parents being coerced? this was not a great institution, by the way. this was not a place you really wanted to be. did parents really feel like they had any sort of choice? a quart of milk a day may not sound like a big deal, but if you don't have it, is this too much coercion? it turns out that when you look at this critically, the levels of radiation that they got probably didn't hurt them very much or at all. but nonetheless, this raises questions about whether it is appropriate to do experiments on institutionalized children without informing either them or their parents. any questions about the fernald experiments? okay. let's move to oregon. so this is the cold war, and we're into radiation, and the idea of nuclear power is very big. and the hope is that we will soon have nuclear-powered airplanes, quite seriously being discussed. pilots who were flying nuclear-powered airplanes are going to be exposed to a lot of radiation. who else is going to be exposed to radiation? space flight, people that go up into space. nasa was interested in this. people who work with nuclear power. if there is a nuclear attack, people will be exposed to radiation. what are they worried about? well, when they talk to potential crew members on nuclear planes, they were especially concerned about damage to what was euphemistically considered the family jewels. rapidly dividing cells. thus, if there is radiation exposure, those are cells that you would expect to be more likely to be hit by the radiation, and this could produce chromosomal damage and potentially problems for your progeny down the road. testicles have the advantage that they can be irradiated without having to radiate the entire body. so, in the oregon state and in the washington state prisons between 1963 and 1973, there were certain radiation experiments done to determine the effect of a radiation on testicles. prisoners? these are healthy men who aren't going anywhere for a while. it's also a way to give them a chance to pay back to society for what they've done. the experiments in oregon were overseen by an extremely prominent endocrinologist. a machine was made to irradiate the testicles. men were asked to lie on their stomach. testicles were placed in warm water so they were hanging down and then they would be radiated. this would be followed by biopsies and then by a vasectomy, because in case the radiation caused chromosomal damage, they didn't want these men to be having any children. it quickly got out by word of mouth, and they knew the institution that was sponsoring this research saw it as sensitive, and they didn't want it to be too public. there was a rather loose and informal psychiatric examination and a consultation with the chaplain. the chaplain was required to certify that the men in question were not roman catholic. because if they were roman catholic, they were not to have a vasectomy. needless to say, there was no benefit to these men in terms of their health. they did get money. they were paid 25 cents a day. they got $25 for a testicular biopsy and another $25 for a va tech tomorr sec tomorrow. $25 back then is equal to about $200 today. if i'm reading your facial expressions correctly, i would assume the answer would be no today. so these were another set of radiation experiments that went on in the prisons. they were stopped in 1970, probably because of changing environment. the administrators were concerned that prisoners couldn't fully consent. i think that's a very valid concern. similar experiments were done in the washington state prison. it's interesting to think for a moment about the use of prisoners in human experimentation in general. the concerns about experimenting on prisoners in the 1940s and '50s were not the same as the ones we have today. the main concern was they would not be adequately punished. you get special privileges, you get to go into the hospital, you might get better food, and if you're in prison, you're supposed to be punished for your crimes. it was affirmed in the journal of the american medical association as being a legitimate way to do experiments. by 1972, 90% of the subjects were phase one drug trials. phase one drug trials are when you have a new drug and you want to try it out and see what happens, gradually increasing doses not as a treatment for disease but just for the toxic effect. the experiments on prisoners were seen as being a privilege, perhaps not surprisingly, fit into more the white than the african-american prisoners. we were in the united states way out of touch with the rest of the world, and almost the entire rest of the world experimentation of prisoners were seen as not ethical and not appropriate. the nuremberg code says you can't force people to do experiments, and if you're in prison, you can't really make a free choice about what you're doing, and so prison experiments in the united states became nonexistent. they came up in the tu srskegee experiments that the president had for only one day. any questions about the prisoner experiments? this is han foford, washington. it's a lovely town on the columbia river. it's remote. and in 1942, it was the site for a plutonium plant and for many years it was the place where a lot of plutonium was made. it was picked for a couple reasons. one is there was ready access to fresh water for cooling in the columbia river. the second reason is that it was out of the way. and if you're making plutonium when plutonium is top secret, you want to be secret. so here's a billboard, don't talk, silence means security. and another sign, loose talk is a chain reaction. and this is how they advertise. richmond is very near hanford. atomic frontier days. a new light on the old frontier. you'll recall that the soviet union launched its first atomic bottom in 1979. how do we know what the soviet union is doing? we know because when you put it up in the atmosphere, it shines in the whole world and we can see evidence of radioactivity here. how do we interpret that? that's hard. so we wanted to figure out what radiation was like when it was put into the atmosphere. how did it come down? where did it come down? how could you detect it? and what better way to find out what that's like than to intentionally release radiation from a plant, like hanford? these are the so-called green run experiments because the fuel that was used was young, or green. so they started releasing radioactivity into the atmosphere so that they could study how and when and where it came down. because this is top secret, of course, they're not bothering to tell the people in the area that, oh, by the way, we'll be putting a lot of radiation into the atmosphere. there were problems. the weather wasn't what they expected or desired. they got more exposure at local sites. we now know that drinking milk compels the grays of pasture. the cows drink the water, they make the milk, the children drink the milk. when they did look to see how the radiation spread around, they did so with considerable secrecy. they pretended to be animal husbandry experiments going out and checking the animals and the cows. if you're a spy, you think about this, but this is in the united states, this is in your backy d backyard. you have someone working for the atomic energy company who claims to be an animal husbandry expert who wants to check your cows. it's unclear how much damage was actually done, how many people were actually injured. it's also clear that there was probably more radiation released from the normal operation of the plants from 1944 to 1947. they released about 80 times as much radiation by accident. but there is an enormous sense of distrust and personal violation that comes from this. here's a cartoon showing hanford in the 1940s and 1950s, you see people surrounded by fumes, kind of skeletal. on the back it says, yes, sir, it's reassuring to know if we were in any kind of danger here, our government would let us know right away. so you risk enormous trust when you start dumping radiation into an empty field. this was not only done in hanford, it was done a number of other places. there were nuclear explosions that were released to the atmosphere that impacted holy sites for the pueblo indians who lived in very close relationship to the land which was obviously in the southwest. and there was some concern and some observations that the spanish and native american residents of these areas tended to find themselves in these areas more downstream than in others. before i transition to how we know about this and how these experiments came to light, any questions about the experiments? how many of you knew about these experiments before this class? word of mouth or reading about them? word of mouth. [ inaudible ] >> they were top secret. there were early reports and rumors that some americans had been injected with plutonium. a congressional report in 1986 was called america's nuclear guinea pigs. fairly land congressional language. a journalist by the name of eileen wilson working for the albuquerque talk tribune wrote about the story the way journalists write about stories like this. which is to say, she got names and faces and the stories are much more compelling when there is an actual person associated with them. i mention aed a few names of people here. she wrote some incredible stories. she's got a wonderful book out called the plutonium files. but really, we started to find out a lot more about these with this book that came out of a commission. this is a rather thick book. this is from the advisory committee on human radiation experiments. it was created in january of 1994. president bill clinton ordered all federal agencies to comb their files and make them public. he said, i want all the information about these radiation experiments out there. and as a result, a ton of stuff was declassified, and one of the things that's happened as a result of this book and this mission was that those declassified documents are now publicly available. and lots of people have gone to them and written about them. the commission that he formed was made up of historians, philosophers, lawyers, radiologists, if i sphycisists. a typist shared with me that his father was actually in hanford in this period. you wonder just what was going on. they held lots of hearings, there were lots of groups of people who felt aggrieved, veterans, combats, mothers who were in the wrong place at the wrong time. how do you differentiate between wrongness of actions and blameworthiness of actions? it's one thing to say they were wrong, it's another to say who was to blame. they were asked to say who was to receive monetary damages? who deserves money for this? who was wronged by the government and deserved to be paid. they came up with a rather short list and they were criticized for that. their report was released, and president clinton apologized on october 3, 1995. and on the evening news that night, i don't think it was even mentioned because also on october the 3rd, 1995, the jury came down with a verdict in the o.j. simpson trial. so it's an example of bad timing to release a report. a quaker outside of this independently settled for $1.85 million for the experiments. this is a wonderful book. this is really a tremendous job of historical and policy-making research. you may notice that some of what i've been telling you might not be as crystal clear as it might be, and that is that the nature of historicalresearch, many of the records of what happened are just incomplete. some things we don't have protocols for. you asked about informed consent. we don't know for many of these experiments. maybe because it was done in wartime, maybe because it was top secret, maybe because nobody boa bothered to write it down. maybe because maybe what we're doing here is a little dicey and maybe we don't want to keep records. we don't know. i think the committee did as good a job as they possibly could finding out as much as they possibly could about this. a fundamental question to grapple with is how do we make retrospect with judgments? how do we assess the past from our own perspective? again, taking informed consent as an example, a lot of the concepts of informed consent were not fully articulated until after this time. it's not fair to go back and say, they didn't do things the way we would have done. they did say the committee came up with a tri parte method of making judgments which i think makes a lot of sense. first they had there are lot of basic ethical principles that stand the test of time and place. they then pointed out all those ethical principles have exceptions. then they said there are certain policies of government departments or agencies. you ought to follow the policies of wherever you're working. the problem here is that if the policies are secret, how do you know about them? finally, they said there are the rules of professional ethics that people need to pay attention to. they did conclude, and i agree, that it's not okay to just use people because they're dying. some of the rationale for some of the plutonium experiments and the other injections was that these people are dying and we might as well get some information from them. being ill and hospitalized does not justify using people as mere means to the ends of others. you still have to respect them as people. so what are the key lessons in these radiation experiments? i've only scratched the surface. and i really hope that you will go and read more about them in books like eileen wilson's book. jonathan marino has a wonderful book on the history of these radiation experiments. they have:>m6r lot more detail. one of the lessons is that medicine and the quest for knowledge has to be looked at in a specific social, political and economic context. it just cannot be understood if you take it out of the context. and these radiation experiments started in the context of a world war and continued, by and large, in the context of a cold war which turned quite hot on occasion. which was characterized by secrecy, which was characterized by fear that these weapons could be used against us. nonetheless, some of the features that came out of these experiments continue to this day. the penchant for large-scale research, for big research, for the idea that if you wanted to do a big project, you can get government funding to do huge, big protocols. even smaller scale protocols have a lot toúdf with the era that this comes out of, the idea of doing studies that go across several different hospitals, for example. people got used to the idea they ought to be funded, and many institutions such as the university of michigan and others are built on this notion that people doing science, people doing physics, people doing medicine should get funding, should get the funding they need to do the research. one of the casualties of these experiments is trust. even if nobody got hurt, there aren't very many people who think, for example, it's a good idea to give children radioactive oatmeal without telling anybody or to release radiation from a plutonium plant to see what happens. even if at the end of the day nobody got hurt, i think it impedes the kind of trust that helps to bind society together in the best possible way. so what i tried to do is give you a sense of some of the radiation experiments, what happened, what some of the consequences were. we've got a few minutes. let me just ask if there are any questions or comments. okay. well, thank you all for your attention. and we'll see you on monday at medical science building 2. the instructions are going to be sent on a message. thank you very much. [applause] tonight on c-span's issue spotlight, a panel of legal analysts via election laws and how they impact voting rights. here's charles zelden talking about election laws and political parties. >> let me do a historian's job and do a little bit of context on why people can come to different conclusions on the same topic. republicans generally have the view of a purpose of an election which is certainty. the purpose of an election is we're clear who won, there is competence of who won and there's no question who won. so anything in a sense that cleans up the electoral process, gives us that certainty, is a burden worth paying because that's the process of election. generally it involves participation. anything that limits the participation of all those who could vote from voting undermines the legitimacy of the outcome. even if that means that the results may be a little messy on the edges. these are both legitimate precisions to take. this is a perspective towards the purpose of the election of voting. but each perspective focuses us on a different answer to the question of what is a legitimate burden for the state to impose upon voters in the voting process. and, of course, underneath this is that not-so-secret dirty little secret that of course each side takes a position that is very comfortable with outcomes that will help them. the broader the electorate, the more general the better it is for republicans. >> you can watch all of our issue spotlight program on voting rights and election laws at 8:00 p.m. eastern on c-span. this weekend on the c-span networks. friday night on c-span, native american history. then on saturday, live all-day coverage from the national book festival science pavilion. saturday evening from bbc scotland, a debate on scotland's upcoming decision on whether to end its political union with england. sunday, q & a with judge robert catsman, chief justice of the second court of appeals. he shares his approach to interpreting laws passed by congress. on c-span 2 friday at 8:00 p.m., in-depth with former congressman ron paul. on saturday, all-day live coverage with the national book festival on the history and biography. sunday, afterwards, with william burrows talking about his book "the asteroid threat." on american history tv on c-span friday, the 1969 apollo 11 moon landing. on saturday, on the civil war, sherman's atlanta campaign. sunday night a look at election laws and supreme court case of bush versus gore. find our television schedule at cspan poi cspan.org and let us know about the programs you're watching. call us or e-mail us at [email protected]. like us on facebook, follow us on twitter. next, presidential historian jeffrey engel talks about the presidency of george h.w. bush and the peaceful end to the cold war. mr. engel is the director of the center of presidential history at southern methodist university. we'll also hear from andrew carr who served as deputy chief of staff for george h.w. bush. this event was hosted by the university of virginia's miller center. this is about two hours. >> this event is called a manuscript review. it was suggested by ira katz nelson about 10 years ago. he said, it's a great conference but you need something to tie the room together. why don't you have a leading scholar come in and present a manuscript in progress and really bring some of the leading scholars and practitioners who can critique that manuscript before it's too late. we've all been there where our book has come out and you participate in a panel and people always say, you know, you should have done this, you should have done that. well, today we do have one of the world's leading scholars, jeff engel, who i will say a word about first. jeff is presenting his manuscript very much in progress, and the title is "when the world seemed new, george h.w. bush, and the cold war's peaceful end." jeff is an associate professor of history and the director of the center for presidential history at southern methodist university. he's the author of numerous books, two of the most recent include "into the desert: reflections on the gulf war," and "the fall of the berlin wall," a legacy of 1989. and we're really fortunate to have jeff with us. he's going to say a few words about his manuscript and he's put a few chapters of it up on line. i know that some of you have had a chance to look at it. ira said, you really should get a practitioner in there, somebody who knows a thing or two about how government actually works. we're very fortunate to have just the right person in this case. that's andrew h. card. mr. card was the chief of staff to president george w. bush from january 2001 to april 2006. an extraordinary long tenure for a chief of staff, if i'm not mistaken about my history. he also has experience with bush i. he was his deputy chief of staff and secretary of transportation for president george h.w. bush. mr. card is currently the executive director in the office of the provost at texas a&m university, and thank goodness that johnny manziel was finally picked in the draft, because i was worried that we were going to lose a commentator, to be honest. ira said, you should get really a leading scholar from history and a leading scholar from another discipline, and we have those scholars with us today as well. david farber is a professor of modern american history at temple university. he is author of a raft of books and even more in influential articles. two of his recent books are "everybody ought to be rich." great title. "the life and times of john j.rascob, capitalist," and "the rise and fall of modern american conservatism." so thank you for joipg us today, david. ask commenting last but certainly not least is melanie mccalister who is head of public affairs, and she's also chair of her department, american studies, at george washington university. melanie is the author of "epic encounters, culture, media and the u.s. interests in the middle east since 1945," and she's also the co-editor with with marie griffith of "religion and politics in the contemporary united states." ira, i know you're watching like a hawk this webcast, along with at least seven other people, so we, i think, are fulfilling not only our obligation to create mentors but to a dream panel for your idea of a manuscript review. so without further ado, i'm going to hand things over to jeff and he can take it away. >> thank you, brian. it's traditional at this particular moment to say how pleased the speaker is to be here, but i have to admit that last night was the nfl draft, and i was fully expecting to be winging my way to a new city at this point, but there is also round 2 and round 3 coming up, so i have hope, still. let me begin by thanking brian and evan mccormick and everyone here at the miller center for this tremendous opportunity. it really is a wonderful opportunity for me to get important feedback at the precise moment that it's most useful, i think, from such esteemed commentators. i want to say how nice it is to be at the miller center again, because this is a place where policymakers can move forward together. having just found a new center for professional history at smu, i can't tell you the number of times where an issue came up, an idea came up, a program came up and we said, how does the miller center do it? because they do it well. >> we ask the same questions. >> we should coordinate on that. let me also take a moment to thank, obviously, the panel. andy card, melanie and david for taking time out of their extraordinarily busy schedules to read probably more pages than was necessary at this point for them. i'm going to do two things in my brief commentary. i've been told to speak for about 10 minutes or so. i have to say my wife will often say i can't clear my throats in 10 minutes, but i'll do my best. i want to have a little bit of discussion of what the book is about, the methodologies involved and the areas i'm trying to cover and then tell you a little about george h.w. bush and what the book ultimately argues and the story it tries to tell. the book actually tries to do several things at once. it is simultaneously a study of u.s. foreign policy during the tumultuous end of the cold war. it is also a group biography looking primarily at george h.w. bush -- whenever i mention president bush, i refer to our guy, 41 -- and it's also a study of him ask those around him, the collective biography, if you will, of american national security decision making during this period. but then it tries to do something else it tries to situate american policy making within a broader international venue. it tries to be an american study and international history. because time and again, we discover events that occurred during 1989, during 1990 and '91 that were in a lot of ways not generated by the united states. in fact, the united states was reactive a lot more than prescriptive during these ooern events. this is really the essence of president bush's policymaking and his policies as a whole was to be consciously reactive without being too overexuberant reacting to certainkddm events. it's important to recall all that occurred during the four years of the bush presidency. that list would have to include, of course, the end of the cold war with ensuing events such as and the other reporters in the room did not, which is that he had spent most of the night and previous hours on the telephone with margaret thatcher, and especially mikhail gorbachev who pleaded with him not to do anything because they knew the excitement of 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 of celebration going too far and being turned into violence by those who thought it had gone too far, was, of course, was tiananmen square which had happened only a couple 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 informers, and those informers, i.e., those who control the communist state have tanks, 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 through with reform, and we see this fear coming through in august 1991 when there was a conservative coup without a likelihood of success, but nonetheless, the great fear 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 hipo drrkscratic lugs, will. the first was in germany because he believed it was necessary to keep stability in europe, because having nato in europe allowed the natives to stay in europe, and he believed firmly what kept the peace since 1955 in europe was his terms, and he kept on with the terms he needed, which was nato. and the second was the gulf war. this really strikes me as the moment we received the end of the cold war. why r why, because we see two things. we see the soviets coming along in an international community in a way they never had before, working with britain, france, and in particular an essential importance 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 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 old world order. i think that messes with the idea that change is moving in an american direction. it was not to suggest the world was going to be perfect but rather, better. the words president bush used, the world 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 i've been afforded before the cold war even occurred, back in 1945. i argue that president bush's vision for the post cold war world was the world that he 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. [applause] >> my name is andy card, and i am an engineer by training, a politician by disease and not a. 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 mistitled. i think it is more of a biography than it is a description of the end of the cold war and the challenges that were faced, but i love the biographical information and i think it is 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 council 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 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 ended in government and they entered -- many entered into government long before president bush became president. i don't think that they anticipated that the day would come 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 are 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 the brent scowcroft, for example, who 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 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 secretaries of state 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 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 council 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 was 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 of 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 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, 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. andrzjnd!dli obviously we know: 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, that i think president bush managed better than historians acknowledge. so he was cognizant of the east germans. the chezechoslovakiaens, and th baltic states. he was cognizant of what their challenges were as 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 an the bush team coming in was a little more pessimistic as they made the change from 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 very 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, 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 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. [ applause ] >> that's the proverbial tough act to follow. thanks so much, brian. thank you for inviting me here and to jeff for giving me this opportunity to talk about his manuscript. jeff brings to this project a tremendous breadth of understanding regarding american international relations at the cusp of the 1980s and 1990s and an 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, felt no need to define. president bush is warmly portrayed in 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 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 his 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 arechival materials, he shows a famously nonintrospective man. president he's's bush 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 he calls cleverly hippocratic 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 by bush's ideological limits in chapter seven. i don't know if many of you saw that yet. president bush obviously was an ardent practitioner of free economics. 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 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 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. angela and the few pages he devotes to explaining the position calls his view 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 unproblemized and unretracted. bush is an individual and the biographical detail is marvelously recounted. bush is a representative of a particular milieu and historical moment, whose leadership shows a world view and social position and those historical rather than biographical markers are largely left unexplored here. jeff calls bush a company man. it is 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 interest in using american power abroad is reflective not of a generalized faith, but of a particularized vision of american principles and interests and those are largely left undefined here because president bush himself rarely articulated them. but even though president bush did not articulate the values, i think jeff has to do more inductive reasoning to explain those views to get those issues. how it translates into a policy driven understanding of strategy in a fast changing international arena is 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 and corporations and governments in achieving a society which allows bush 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. the pocket portraits of james bakker, ben scowcroft and a few other key advisers are well told here and utility in advising are well articulated. the cia, the state department rarely if ever appear in these pages. my understanding is that president bush was a firm believer in the products produced by the intelligence community and was a regular consumer of such briefings. but we don't see that material here. maybe it will come later in the manuscript. in the pages i read, bush relies on his own feelings about the ussr and gorbachev and china and deng and 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 wonder why this info does not reach bush or if bush just dismisses it or what. i don't really know. i would think it would figure more prominently in the white house. overall, jeff is dedicated to arguing that leadership matters and different leaders do things for are their own reasons. but i have little sense in these pages i read that president bush is the head of the executive branch of the government who sits atop a mountain of information formulated by a broad range of experts representing different bureaucracies and administrations and political views and agendas. presidential decision-making under bush in jeff's account seems extraordinarily tightly circumscribed and based on little empirical information. the book of essays on the bush presidency, in the particular essay by bartholomew sparrow, before jeff's essay on this book, argues that the bushes who managed national security as well as it could have been managed and the momentous era of world history and their success was the product of their policy process. now, i know jeff's writing for a broad audience and the conventions of presidential history demand a focus on the president and tight circle of leaders. after doris kearns goodwin, we're all looking for that clever way to encapsulate this sense of how presidential administrations actually work. still, i think jeff can do much more in explaining how bush the company man produced and orchestrated such a superb foreign policy team and how specifically bush was able to train his attention on key materials and receive the advice he did. while issues of the administration and administrative procedure can be dull, they can be fascinating as business management shows. i think demonstrative of the degree 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, that administrative capacity and decision-making processes will be a key aspect of the history of the modern presidency, the bush presidency will stand out for that particular set of abilities and talent. and while it seems likely that sparrow is right in praising the bush white house's effort, i think 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 is critically important aspect of the history of the cold war. i think greater attention to how bush led his white house and his administration into the unavoidable fog of international security policymaking would strengthen the analytic power of this work. in a related vain, i was surprised how little attention jeff gives to congress, the political opinion or political context in which bush operates. more than 300 pages of the manuscript he gives readers about five pages on such matters. but the treatment is is fairly cursory. does such indifference to democratic politics and the democratic process reflect bush's own dismissal of such matters or is it indicative of the kind of leader bush was or indifferent or disdainful of the democratic policy or what? jeff says he's not much interested in accounting for the behavior of crowds and any of the cold war. the american people at either as actors in their own rite or subjects of president bush's concerns is striking. president bush clearly was not president clinton who was energized by an interest in interacting with individual americans of all kinds. but i do wonder what the partisan -- i do wonder what the patrician president made of his duties. finally, i want to comment on international history. jeff spends a great many pages writing not about president bush and the white house policymaking 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 the manuscript has so many pages and there were a lot of pages is that jeff in 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 leader saw the world as they did. such pockets greatly expand the breadth of his story and deepen his explanations of the context in which american policymakers must act in which presidential decisions depend. such an international perspective in which other nations are juxtaposed to the american perspective have become the fashion in the writing of diplomatic and international relations history for very good reason. such broad perspective history is made clear that the united states policymakers act in a world bound by different interests and principles, which makes the american position the world both clear in its distinctions and its similarities to other powers, both great and small. this internationalizing project has obvious strengths and the pages are compelling. but at risk of being a contrarian, i see a weakness in this approach. i think i'm following a little bit of what andy card said, jeff almost never relates the parallel histories to u.s. policymaking or to president bush's understanding of the changing strategic environment in which he must operate. rather than give readers such lengthy and nearly independent accounts of such nation and different leaders historical understands and trajectories, my thought is 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 them as concurrent events or semiparallel tracks to what is happening in the bush administration. perhaps what the foreign leaders understand and did not understand about the united states and the bush white house would better explain the critical interaction between those nation and the bush led white house. i would think it more pertinent to the core story of bush's corps 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 too the lack of historical accounting by eng of internal information dissemination about internation international affairs is striking. the process of policymaking and the information and cultural precepts and ideological understandings that undergird that bopolicymaking is missing from jeff's collide scopic history. the stories of the last years of the cold war informative but given the core story is how the bush white house managed the end of the cold war, i think an opportunity is missed. i wonder if fewer pages on the historical trajectory of other nation states and more pages on how the white house under bush perceived keat nations and how they perceived the united states might make for sharper an lit ache approach to the role of international leadership and the american role in the leadership bringing 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 actually read the manuscript and that i've earned my invitation here. many thanks to jeff and to the miller center for giving me the which ns to read this and, like, andy, i can't wait to see the rest of the manuscript. thanks so much. [ applause ] >> 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 character comes in and speaks from it and there is a crook that comes 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 appreciate. 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 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 low 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 are does involve the slowing down enultimately 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 goal 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, and one part of the manuscript talking about the movement against short -- medium range missiles in europe and western german 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 activist 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 say 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 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 on s 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, is 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 store ary 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. we think about how americans were thinking about the end of the cold war, the potentialnd 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 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, though it is often phrased as being wary about the soviet union, in practice, it 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 and 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 house 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 and 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 and how to 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 &háhp &hc% 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 too 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 lovti component and bringing in 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. [ applause ] >> 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. [ applause ] . i can assure you none of us would be here without evan. and i also want it 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. though 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. three things that happened for me, that 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 wit it 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 do 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 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 keep a keen eye on that as i go forward. and i'll make just preview something that i've written, but 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 going forward. the president considered him to be his own china expert and understood china, he thought, as well as anybody. better than anybody. 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 is very interesting to me that a policymaker bush, this is an area where the only area where james bakker inserts himself into tiananmen square. things blow up in continue minh square and this is a little bit hyperbollic, 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 no, they were not. yes, they were marching, yes, they were carrying banners saying freedom and democracy and eastern european protesters were smart enough to put them in english so they could be read by an international audience. but the chinese students had a different conception of what prefreeh dom meapr 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. 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. this is something which i want to explore and 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, what is the domestic scene and how is that affecting policy. you make an extraordinarily brilliant insight, u.s. foreign policy people are good at and thought a lot about domestic affairs in other countries, but not on 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 is interesting, you raise the issue of the global south, what the importance was there. and here i suspect i'll be remarkably unpopular in ten seconds to say that the argument that the global south drove the cold war, was definitive of the cold war, at the very least does not appear in the bush record. that here is a case in point where lots of events are going on. south africa is a tremendous example. there is unbelievable change in south africa, and the administration says see, everything is going our way throughout the world, now let's focus locus of attention, 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. that seems to be the way i'm reading their discussions. i think after that, i should throw it open and -- >> 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 hearseburg from george washington university. quick question for jeffrey and two small questions relevant for jeffrey for andrew. one for jeff, i know that you know that i'm a huge believer in international history and international sources. and, you know, amazing materials are now open in moscow as well as on call and mitterrand and thatcher. if you could point to one lingering mystery you would 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 close, i'm curious, your opinion. one had to deal 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 comfortable had they switched positions as president. george h.w. bush was comfortable waging cold war. it took a period of psychological adjustment to really become comfortable with the idea this is all over and this is a new world. and where as 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, that he was built to wage the cold war. and he really had a psychologically to overcome that in the period that jeff started writing 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 when it was clear that the europeans were bungling. to what extent were those legitimate policy considerations? was it essentially just psychological exhaustion? and distraction after this stress of waging the iraq war as well assomely dealing with the process of dealing with change in europe and legitimate policy arguments being made. thank you. >> 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 2004 to bring new documents out of the bush library. 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 trench 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 august 1991. or 1990. this was troubling because all the other 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. other people could quote this and we couldn't. if you want to say what happened, that's one thing. if you can'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. so that 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 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 i don't think he was relishing jimmy carter's role. 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 that he was -- he was a very good listener. and most presidents i find aren't good listeners. he was a very good listener. 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 bombastic 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 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 and how that geography had been defined, but my perception was they didn't recognize how darn tribal yugoslavia was, and yet -- and most of the challenges in yugoslavia at the time resulted in the tribes deciding to organize, rather than the nation trying to organize it. 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 to say it was easier when we dealt with the top-down folks. some of it was hot, most of it was not, it was political and let's let the europeans deal with it. i don't want to say it was the two personalities -- but i suspect those two personalities did influence the president. well, how much can you carry on your plate? president bush probably had more on his plate than any one-term president, including -- he was a president that didn't have either house of congress with him. so he had a lot of challenges just to deal with whatever solution he was offering, whether it was domestic or foreign policy. there was a loud and serious and frequently contrarian echo. he had to deal with that at the same time any first-term president is focused on their opportunity to be a two-term president. and that was building over the time, especially when yugoslavia was starting to implode. >> i think it touches on something that 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 is really one of those structures. it was very difficult at the end of the cold war, the new world order was about the united nations and nation states treating each other well. that's was the war in iraq fits so nicely for bush to understand what the united states response should be. ethnic tension, dar i say terrorist ultimately, was not the prevalent issue? bush's world view. >> will hitchcock here at the miller center and the history department. before we came in we had a 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 are on the president at any one typhoon. jeff, i think each of your commentators in different and very sophisticated ways that is 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. of course, that's your subject, your focus. i think i know what you're going to say, you have to say this, but for the if you were of discussion about the methodology that you are pursuing, i want to ask if we can really write a good presidential -- a study of presidential leadership without taking into can see 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 opinion, the pursuit of a second term. these are issues that are not peripheral. they are absolute lid fundamental. i think they would probably occupy as much time if el 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? this isn't the first time you're -- this isn't the last time you're going to hear this line of criticism. what about 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 do a better job of making sure it's not 100% complete sacrifice, but as well as forced to make to include the international side. i think one could write a full study of a presidency, domestic and foreign, something on eisenhower, for example would be good. we do need a new book on eisenhower. i think one could do that, but you would simply not have enough pages, 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 in 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. so that to focus on the is makes more sense for bush than for others during this period. but this is difficult. in fact i should mention the evolution of the study. the study originally set out to be full soup to nutz it 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 from a to z covering all foreign policy issues. simply two things occurred. i realized the voluminous data was to make simply a similar study if there's an international component that much more voluminous perhaps to the point of impossible. secondly, and this i have to thank my editor for, there was a moment where we were discussing how to square this circle, because i still wanted to do everything. he said, well, what do you really care about? i said, i care about the end of the cold ward. he said, done. >> my conception is also which you china and other areas of the world which aren't always necessarily put in the story. even still, i think i'm trying to have a narrative structure that offers the international view and clearly needs to do more on the domestic front. i don't notice --ished not do without really running into -- without really need ago divorce lawyer, probably. i could not do that full synthetic stud in less than 2,000, 4,000 pages, and i wouldn't read that. >> i actually agree with jeff on this, though he's done it effectively for one tiny instance with gorbachev. his visit to the united nations, and 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 a rallying figure that beck 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 had 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 can't not -- there aren't enough volumes to be read by anybody -- >> including a very personal one. not only that the destruction of the house, but towards the end of add mrgsz president bush and mrs. bush and the dog all develop a thyroid problem simultaneously. >> that's true. iismts and this obviously causes the secret service much consternation, two people and a dog develop it. so this really was time-consuming, how to regulate the president's health. he and those around him complained that he was more fatigued as they tried to get the medicine right, but 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. >> who are you? >> rebecca brewbarrack, one central 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 rock. aside from the two events where he dipped his hands into guide those events, is there a mission he most regretted, where he wished he would have dipped his hand -- i would have wondered about yugoslavia, and maybe a related question -- was there any point near the end of his presidency, where he started to question whether that flow really was headed in a better direction, as opposed to a different direction, a more volatile and dangerous in different -- did the optimism always stay with him, i guess is the question. >> there was a lot happening in africa. the knewájvfñ3ñ%w happening. he would get reports. that would be reported up. 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, disruptive governance. you had the throeing of the end

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