Turn . Guest well, i wouldnt say date that created it, but if i had to pick one date as the epicenter, perhaps, of the turn, it would have been the reykjavik summit in october of 1986, just about five years ago from this fall. Cspan what happened there . Guest in this remarkable event, probably the most remarkable meeting of u. S. And soviet leaders, certainly since kennedys meeting with khrushchev in vienna, reagan and gorbachev and shevardnadze and shultz sat down in a small room in reykjavik over a dining room table and started negotiating over their entire nuclear arsenal. They had on the table to be bargained with the entire stock of Ballistic Missiles in the arsenals of both governments which were the basic weapons underpinning their national power. At the end of the summit reagan even said and i have the quotes authenticated for the first time why dont we just get rid of all Nuclear Weapons . Just get rid of them all. And gorbachev said, yes, lets do that. Lets just get rid of them. If youll remember, it broke up in its final hour over sdi, but it was the most spectacular event, deemed to be a failure in its immediate aftermath, but it opened the way, in a way, toward a degree of trust and a degree of willingness to bargain that was not the case before that meeting. Cspan whats this picture right here . Guest thats the picture. That picture shows gorbachev and reagan and two interpreters. Shortly after that picture was made, shevardnadze and shultz joined them at the table. Its a dining room table in hofdi house in reykjavik the Government Guest house where they had these extraordinary negotiations for two days in october, 1986. Cspan were you there . Guest no. I was on leave that fall as a professor at princeton. Its the only one of the meetings that i was not at. Cspan how did you approach doing this book . Guest well, i had covered for the Washington Post nearly all of the major events the summits, the ministerial meetings, and so on and i had in my mind a kind of basic framework of what had happened. I saw it at the beginning as a great turning point in history so i started with my own articles and with my own longhand journal which id been keeping for a number of years to give me the flavor of events. And then i started interviewing and obtaining other information i had 122 interviews, about twothirds of them with american officials reagan, bush, shultz, baker, all the secretaries of defense, all the National Security advisers, all the soviet Desk Officers and so on and then the other third roughly, were with soviet officials in moscow. They gave me terrific access. I had the only book interview that shevardnadze ever gave as foreign minister, and when he agreed to be interviewed by me, then everybody under him agreed automatically, the way their system works or at least worked at that time. And, too, i interviewed three members of the politburo and so on, so that with all this mass of information and interviews, i then sat down and put the pieces together in my little upstairs study at my house sat there for six months and wrote the book. Cspan did you work at the post during the time . Guest i worked during my interview time, although i took a few days and weeks off, but i had a sixmonth leave last year to do the writing. I couldnt write the book doing daily reporting at the same time. Its just beyond my capacity. Cspan what was your objective to even write the book in the first place . Guest well, i did a book 20 years ago that was published just 20 years ago, the only other book ive written, and that was on the tet offensive in vietnam which was the turning point of the vietnam war. Its a very satisfying thing one of the most satisfying things that i ever did. A person like me has written i dont know how many thousands of newspaper articles and dozens of magazine articles. Those things are read, people react to them and tomorrow you wrap fish in the newspaper that you got today. They dont have much of a long life. A book has a really long life. My book on tet is still in print after 20 years. Its being used by colleges and universities; its in every decent library in the country. I set out to do with this turning point, which is a much more ambitious book in a much bigger canvas, what i did then in a way, and that is to greatly deepen my knowledge as a person who covered it and greatly deepen the knowledge and understanding of the readers of one of the great dramatic turning points of our time, and do something that will stand up for a long time, that future historians as well as scholars and students and ordinary americans can read and say this is what happened. Cspan who are the people, in your opinion, that made the difference . Guest well, there are a lot of people, of course, but you have to really look first and foremost at the leaders. We tend to forget this, but when gorbachev came to power in 1985, it was the First Time Since 1972 that you had a politically and physically healthy soviet leader and a politically and physically healthy american leader in office at the same time. After nixons summit with brezhnev, his first summit in 72, there was watergate, and nixon was weakened by watergate. Then came gerald ford who was an unelected president , then came jimmy carter. By the time carter was well ensconced in office, Leonid Brezhnev was in a decline. If you will remember, at the summit with carter in 1979, he was almost like a vegetable. He had to be carried around and so forth. He was succeeded by yuri andropov, a soviet leader who had only about four months of Decent Health in office before his kidneys failed, and then by chernenko who had emphysema so bad when he took office that he could barely complete a speech. So when gorbachev came in in 1985 and reagan had just been reelected by a tremendously big majority in the United States, you had two strong guys who could interact. Gorbachev, in my opinion, is going to be one of the great historical figures of the 20th century. Weve seen the deficiencies and difficulties and weaknesses, but, with all that, this could not have happened without him and he is going to be a very important figure in history. Hes certainly a very important figure in my chronicle of what happened. Ronald reagan was much readier than we knew, certainly much readier than i knew as a reporter, to engage with the soviets to get in there and bargain with them even while he was condemning them in the harshest terms. So, reagan is an important figure. Shultz and shevardnadze in their own right were extremely important. George shultz is a steady, methodical, sort of bulldog figure who knew how to get things done, and as an economist, which is sort of rare in the political side of government, hes a man who believed in the long gain and in steady inputs in putting things on the table and keeping at it. Shevardnadze, i think, is just a truly remarkable person a remarkable figure. He is a man who had absolutely no experience in diplomacy, none in democracy, and he became one of the important diplomats of our time and, in my opinion, a smalld democrat. How he got that way is an incredible puzzle, and i think he was more important than we knew to lots of things that took place in the soviet union. Cspan you spent a lot of time with George Shultz and Eduard Shevardnadze in preparation for this book . Guest i spent a lot of time with George Shultz. I had 13 taped interviews with him in california at his place in stanford. I didnt spent nearly as much time with shevardnadze. I had one interview in moscow in the foreign ministry, but thats more than anybody else had. So, i dont know, in the kingdom of the mind, the man is king perhaps. But i watched him over time as well. Cspan the interesting thing i noticed that in your liner notes, your acknowledgements you sign off on this in the introduction at january 1991. This book was written long before the coup attempt. Guest yes, it was. I made some changes as late as this last spring and early part of the summer, but even that was before the coup attempt. But a lot of the things that happened later you can see them sort of growing. You can almost see the seeds growing in this book as the hardliners get more authority in moscow, as the military begins to interfere more with what gorbachev is wanting to do, even in 1989 and 1990, as the consequences of the change in Eastern Europe began to be felt in the soviet union. Cspan you also interviewed cap weinberger . Guest yes. Cspan and you talk a lot in here about the feud between George Shultz and cap weinberger . Guest i talk some in there yes. Cspan not a lot. Why were they feuding . Guest as best i can tell they never liked each other in the first place. They worked together at the bureau of the budget back in the nixon administration. Shultz was head of it, weinberger was his deputy, and they didnt really get along that well. Then they went to bechtel. Shultz, again, was president of the company. Weinberger was the general counsel. Then in the Reagan Administration weinberger was there first as secretary of defense. Shultz only came in after haig resigned in the summer of 1982. Theyre two very, very different people. Shultz is a very methodical, steady thoughtful person who is not a person that likes to battle over things, and he will fight on his turf. But weinberger is much more the guy who enjoys combat. At bechtel they said he would like to litigate. He wanted to get in there and scrap. Their personalities are different. They had different bureaucratic positions, of course. Weinberger at defense was suspicious of negotiations with the soviet union which seemed to raise questions about the need for a 300 billion defense budget. Shultz wanted to carry on the negotiations. So, all through the administration they were at each others throats on a variety of things, including response to terrorism and many other things that we all remember. Cspan a surprising note when i read that George Shultz wanted to keep the marines in lebanon, according to your book, when cap weinberger wanted to bring them out after 200andsome had been killed . Guest yes. Cspan why . You would think the pentagon chief would have been the hawk to say, stay there. Guest thats a misunderstanding, really, of the pentagon. They dont like their people being killed; they dont like their people in risk. Militarily it was not a very sensible position. I think the Long Commission which you will remember investigated the tragic killing of the marines, said that it was militarily indefensible. Shultz felt it was very important for National Reasons not to give the impression of turning pale and running. He was standing almost alone in the administration insisting that they remain, while weinberger and jim baker and thenvice president bush and others who for a variety of reasons, some of them political with the campaign of 1984 coming along, wanted them out of there. Cspan is it healthy to have a secretary of defense and the secretary of state disagreeing strongly or having a feud . Guest i dont think it is. I think its healthy to have differences of opinion and to have honest differences, either from bureaucratic position or from your own philosophical or political position, but to carry it to the extent that the Reagan Administration did and that president reagan tolerated it i think is not healthy, just as i dont think it was healthy to have brzezinski and vance for years battling during the Carter Administration because at the end of the day the government needs to have a policy a policy, not two policies or three policies. Cspan are you still covering the state department . Guest yes, but not on the same daily basis as i was doing for 15 years. Ive been asked to take what is called a broderlike role in Foreign Policy, referring to our chief Political Correspondent david broder, and to concentrate on broader issues, major projects, travels of my own abroad rather than traveling on a plane with the secretary of state, and sort of trying to use such experiences ive piled up in 15 years of covering diplomacy to do a bigger picture. Cspan are you pretty much assured that when you write an article in the Washington Post that everybody thats playing in the diplomatic game reads it . Guest oh, i think probably. The Washington Post in this city is kind of the breadandbutter information source that everyone shares. It would be unusual if an article on any major subject that was of interest in washington was not read by all the players involved. We just assume that. Cspan when youre traveling with the secretary of state, do they ever walk back in the plane and say, i just got faxed to me this article that you wrote, and they want to dispute something . Is it that instantaneous that they know what youre doing when youre out there running around the world . Guest the secretary of state when he travels receives faxes every night of every article in the Washington Post that has to do with diplomacy or with him, of course, and so they have it all of our file, every day. They dont get it, we hope before it appears in the paper. Rarely do they come over and say, we didnt like that. Its not the style of people in government. You sort of get it indirectly and you hear that theres a little bit of static up in the front of the plane about the article or that sort of thing. So they dont come at you. But we know that theyre reading it. We know. Cspan at what lengths do they go to keep you informed and to keep their message in front of you when youre traveling . Or when youre here, for that matter. Guest well, through the usual briefings and things like that, of course. But any reporter who is able to do so wants to penetrate beyond that and find out more. The one good thing in working for an organization like the Washington Post i shouldnt say one good thing; there are many good things is that people do tend to respond to your telephone calls and to see you. You say, i dont understand why youre doing this. Explain to me whats going on here, or i have learned x. Tell me your side of the story. You could usually at least get through. Whether you get the real story or not, thats another question. Cspan how long have you been with the Washington Post . Guest twentythree years. Cspan what did you do before that . Guest well, you remember when we first met i was covering the nixon white house. I covered nixons campaign for election in 1968, his taking office in his first term as president , then i went out to asia and became the tokyo correspondent, the northeast asia correspondent, for the post for three years. I came back after three years in 1976 and began to start covering the state department, and have been covering american diplomacy ever since. Cspan where did you grow up . Guest atlanta, georgia. Cspan where did you go to school . Guest Druid Hills High School in atlanta, georgia, and then through a kind of fluke went to Princeton University four years at princeton, which opened my eyes to a world that i had no idea even existed. Then i went into the army in korea and started off as a newspaperman in charlotte, north carolina, for the charlotte observer. Cspan what was your family like . Guest in atlanta . Cspan in atlanta. Guest my dad was an Insurance Agent and a wonderful, gregarious person. My mother was a collegeeducated woman, which was not too frequent for her generation. She went to Goucher College up here near baltimore. I have one brother, 15 months younger than i, who is in the family insurance business. I had a great time growing up in atlanta. Its a wonderful city. I have a lot of friends and family there. Cspan what stimulated your interest in going to a place like princeton . Guest well, a friend of mine, who i went all though school with, and i decided to go to college together. We were best friends and he picked out princeton and i picked out the university of north carolina, which was about as far as my horizons could possibly extend in those days. In the end, i went to princeton and he went to the university of north carolina. I went there as a freshman. I had never been there; i didnt know anybody who was going there or anybody who had ever gone there. All i knew about it was it was in the east and it was supposed to be hard to get into and it had something called the Woodrow Wilson school of public and international affairs, which i was interested in. I wanted to know what was going on in the world. I wanted to be a newspaperman even then. I joined it, and it was a Great University life. Cspan Woodrow Wilson was president of princeton at one point . Guest he was president before he was president of the United States. Cspan did you know who he was, and did you know what you were getting into before you got there . Guest i knew who he was, but i had no idea what i was getting into. My first year at princeton i was scared to death. All the people around me had come from, i thought, the best prep schools in the United States. In those days princeton was about twothirds prep school and onethird high school. Today its about the reverse. I went through 11 years of school before going to college which was georgia in those days, and all these other guys, i thought, were way ahead of me. And they were. So, i worked my tail off my freshman year. Each year it got a little bit easier until i graduated. Cspan when did you first know that you were interested in writing for a living . Guest my best friend, the guy who i applied to college with, says that when we were in the third grade i came in off the playground one day after playing soccer and said to him, when i grow up i want to be a newspaper reporter, which was a kind of bizarre thing because there was nobody in my family nobody that i had ever known who wanted to be a newspaper reporte