Political events, where the soviet people were, in fact, breaking free of their past. So it has sort of multiple meanings. And actually, the concept of freedom is dealt with quite a lot in the book. Cspan whats the book about . Guest well, the book is about my love affair and eventual marriage with a member of gorbachevs inner circle, a man who was a member of the communist party and the head of the soviet Space Program at the time. I should say the civilian program. But really, its this story set against the backdrop of the end of the cold war and the collapse not only of the soviet union but the end of soviet communism. Cspan what years did you write about . Guest well, the main part of the story really takes place between 1986 and 1991, the very last years of soviet rule. Cspan what were you doing in 1986 . Guest well, i was traveling back and forth quite a lot before i met the man who became my husband, and i was representing the Eisenhower World Affairs Institute at the time. Id helped them put together a u. S. Soviet program. I thought it would be a very appropriate area for the institute to focus on. So i was traveling there just not long after gorbachev came to power and watching all of this change take place slowly at first, and then of course, much more quickly. Cspan where do you live now . Guest well, we are now married, and we live in the washington area. Cspan youve got some kids. Guest well, thats right. Between the two of us, weve got five. Mind you, three of them are really well, four of them are all but grown up. He has a son and a daughter who are in their 30s, and my oldest is 23 and 21. But i have a 14yearold at home. Cspan now, heres a picture that people will recognize. You are on this side. And well get a shot of it. You write a couple of times about your grandfather. How important was he to you . Guest oh, i think he was very important to me. He was elected when i was about 18 months old, and so, certainly, in my early years, we had a very intense relationship due to the fact that he was in the white house. Sometimes people think that creates all kind of barriers. In fact, it brings many, many families very close together because families are the principal source of support and solace and friendship, really, even. So then he moved up to gettysburg in his retirement years, and my father worked with him on the writing of the two volumes on the white house. So that i think i saw him probably two or three days a week for many, many years. And i was extremely fortunate to have that opportunity, i think. Cspan what do you remember most about him . Guest well, if i were to stand back and think about what he was like as a grandfather, he had one quality that i thought was absolutely marvelous, in retrospect. I always admire it when i find it in other people. And that is that you always knew where you stood with him. He wasnt a sulker. He wasnt a kind of guy who would get angry and then not express himself on the subject. You always had a sense of where you were with him. And he was extremely affectionate and engaged with us. And for grandchildren, thats very lucky. Cspan your father is . Guest my father is john eisenhower. He is my grandparents only surviving child. They had a young son who died at the age of 3 back in the 20s, so my father ended up being an only child. And i think that consequently brought us much closer to my grandparents, too. Cspan where is he today . Guest well, he lives outside of washington, d. C. , in the on the eastern shore, and he is a professional writer, as you may know. Hes written many distinguished books on military history. Cspan your brother, david. Guest hes a writer, too. And he lives he and his wife, julie, live outside of philadelphia. Cspan did you write this book yourself . Guest oh, yes. Absolutely. Every word, im here to report. But you know, i have done a lot of writing not only for publications but i wrote my husbands memoirs, and ive got another book in the works, so this, by the way, happens to be a family failing. You know, nearly id say, certainly, 50 percent of the family has written books or continues to so. Cspan theres a picture here of your husband. And i want to ask you to pronounce his name for us. Guest well, his name is roald sagdeev. Sagdeev, of course, in russian you always put the syllable on the in the middle, the accent on the middle syllable. And his first name actually is roald. We get all kinds of variations on that, everything from raoul to ronald. But in fact, he was named for the man who discovered the south pole, roald amundsen, a norwegian man. Cspan how long have you been married to him . Guest well, we just had our fifth wedding anniversary in february, so the years have gone very quickly. Cspan when did you first meet him . Guest well, we met in 1987. And this was a return conference that was given by the american side as a followup to a conference i had chaired cochaired the year before in the soviet union. This in 1986, we had put together the first open policy debate in the soviet union. It was the first time american officials had debated their soviet counterparts in front of a televised audience. It really created quite a sensation at the time, in 1986. So we had envisioned this as being an ongoing kind of forum. So in 1987, it was the soviets turn to come to the United States, and roald was on the soviet official delegation and i was on the american official delegation. Cspan what do you remember about that first personal togetherness . Guest well, roald had already a pretty well established reputation in, certainly, arms control circles and circles that deal with u. S. Soviet relations. Hes a very funny man, and he was always known to be disarmingly open. So id heard about him, but i was quite unprepared for this meeting because he has a boyish, impish quality that is really very endearing. And he popped right up with, you know, the great opening line of all time. He asked me if i thought my grandfather was serious about the militaryindustrial complex, hardly a romantic opening, would you say . Cspan and what was the situation in your own personal lives at that time . Guest well, he was legally married at the time, though separated. And i was a single parent. I had been on my own for almost seven years, at that point raising three kids and doing you know, holding down a fulltime busy washington job. And so but i must say very quickly, brian, that there is there was no notion of romance in the beginning at all. I mean, relations between our countries were so tense at that time, it would be a concept that wouldnt even cross your mind. At that time, you know, the soviet union was still engaged in afghanistan. We had huge fights over Strategic Defense Initiative and related issues to the abm treaty. There were refuseniks all over moscow. Andrei sakharov had just been actually, in 1987, hed not been let out of captivity just yet. So i mean, things were very tense. The fact that we struck up a friendship immediately was extremely surprising and unusual and rare and, frankly, i thought, uncomfortable. Cspan whats the difference in your age . Guest i think 19 years. Another thing to add to the long list of many differences between the two of us. Cspan whats he doing right now . Guest he teaches physics. Hes a his title is distinguished professor of physics at the university of maryland. He teaches plasma physics for the controlled fusion topic and also Space Science issues, an area that he spent more than 15 years in. Cspan is he still a russian citizen . Guest yes, he is. Cspan think hell ever become an american . Guest well, i think thats a highly personal decision. I have an exhusband who was an englishman and i was under tremendous pressure to when i was just married under tremendous pressure to become a british citizen. And i just didnt want to do that. In his case, i think he always had many differences with the regime and was extremely outspoken. He had become a communist party member under real duress and coercion because he was already running the Space Program by that time, and basically, they kind of linked his ability to continue to do scientific projects to his becoming a member of the party. So he was never an apologist for his country. But you know, loving your country and being attached to your country is quite different than who is in power at any given time. People are very attached to russia as a concept, as a land mass. And i really dont think its appropriate for him to be pushed by anybody. Cspan when was the last time you were in russia . Guest well, it was this year. It was earlier this year. And part of that is because the book came out, and then i started the book promotion and im meeting a deadline on another book. But hes actually in moscow right now. And after that, hell be going to central asia. Cspan which language do you speak to one another . Guest well, we speak in english, largely because he had a head start on the he spoke pretty good english when we met. I mean, of course, its much better now. Ive helped him. Hes got all the slang down now, which certainly makes conversation entertaining. Cspan i want to show this picture and ask you to tell us whos in it. Guest the top. Cspan that one right here. Guest oh, the bottom one . Well, you know, this picture was taken just after our first meeting at the opening session of the chautauqua conference and youll see these the woman who is actually standing colleen dewhurst, the late actress. She was quite involved in u. Ssoviet exchange, mostly in the theater area. And there were many such people at this particular conference. They were not part of the official delegation that was actually debating publicly, but they were part of the larger cultural and citizens audience. Cspan your husbands over here . Guest yes, over there, shamelessly focusing attention on me. I must say, i thought i was so frightened about the picture, let alone anything else. After it came back from the developer, i thought, gee whiz im going to have to lock this up someplace because he was very obviously focusing tremendous attention on me that was certainly unwanted at the time. Cspan what year was that . Guest well, that was 1987. This was during this very, very difficult period. And i should say that because of his position in the soviet Space Program, he was involved in a very well, he was involved in the most highly secretive sector of all soviet society. That is, the socalled militaryindustrial complex. Most of the Space Program, in fact, was part of the military program. And although he was the head of the civilian program, he worked you know, worked and knew the people who made up the military side. So it might have been one thing, perhaps, if a russian, or i should say a soviet theater director had lavished such attention on me, but it was quite another thing to have the man who was advising gorbachev on arms control and sdi system and mission to mars and topics like that be making such a fuss. Cspan was there ever a time in your early relationship where you thought you had a problem you know, you wanted to say, i dont i dont want this to go any farther . Guest oh, i think we had constant problems in the beginning actually, all the way through until our marriage. At first, i mean, we were both utterly aware of the futility of developing any kind of a friendship. I certainly felt that way very strongly. So i think hed come to rely on me, in certain ways. Its interesting. He and others admitted to me privately that they felt they could trust me because they didnt think a member of the eisenhower family would work for the cia. And because of that, because he, i dont know, seemed to have an instinctive sense that what he told me would stay with me, he confided to me really right from the beginning about experiments, about the regime and what was happening inside of his country and the pressures he was under personally. Cspan how long did you when did you know that he was romantically interested . Guest well, i would say that there were hints that i probably ignored, but he i would say probably i knew it by the end of the Washington Summit in 1987. This was he was serving as an adviser to gorbachev during that summit and spoke out on the usual issues there on the table. But he you know, he talked to me in certain ways. There was an unforgettable moment when he was leaving new york to go back to moscow, and he told me that he had gone to a Chinese Restaurant and that he had picked up a Fortune Cookie that he thought was deeply significant. Fancy that thought, and he said, well, it says its better to be respected than to be loved. But then he said, im looking for both. And i thought, well, ok, here we are. I knew at the end of the Washington Summit that we were going to have to try to put an end to this because were only talking about a friendship after all. But in most contexts appearances are every bit as important as what was going on in reality because he had things that he could tell me about that the authorities wouldnt want to see conveyed. And he had always been known as a bit of a troublemaker anyway. So i was you know, having been in the field for a couple of years, i was very cognizant of the dangers. And of course, he was even more aware of them, though he didnt like to talk about it. Cspan when did others notice that there was something going on between the two of you . Guest oh, i think pretty early on. As a matter of fact, after the chautauqua meeting, the chairman of the soviet side, a woman named Valentina Tereshkova and by the way, shes known in the west as being the first soviet first woman in space as a matter of fact. But she whenever i would see her after that meeting in september, she would tease me unmercifully about what she called sagdeevs great affection for me. Well, she had her, you know, wellestablished in the soviet hierarchy, but i think the first notice that i took very seriously was during the Washington Summit period. A man named Yevgeni Primakov who, by the way, is now director of the Russian ForeignIntelligence Service told roald that this friendship would have to stop. Roald, of course, conveyed that to me, and i took it pretty seriously. Cspan now, this picture, i think, has mr. Primakov in it. Guest yes. He is next to the last, as a matter of fact. Cspan here . Guest no, on the other side. Cspan on the other side . Oh, i see. Guest yes. Cspan yes. Next to roald. Guest hes leaning back. Thats right. And actually, they were personal friends. They had been at Moscow State University at exactly the same time. They had known each other for quite some time. Its just that theres no doubt that even at that time, we knew that primakov was a rising star within the soviet establishment, and when he said that this thing had to stop, you know, i personally was not absolutely convinced he was speaking for himself. Cspan when did it become public that there was a relationship, other than just friends . Guest well, it really it really didnt all the way up until the time we announced our engagement because wed had a number of tremendous hoops to jump through. First of all, roald was holding a very important position within the soviet union. Two, as a matter of fact. He was a member of their parliament, the old supreme soviet. And he was also the head of the Space Research institute. And he told me early on that there would really be no way that he could hold those official positions and be involved with me. So he said that since this was what he wanted to do, he would have to undergo a very complicated job of trying to resign from his positions and to go into socalled private life. I have to tell you by the way, theres no such thing as private life. There wasnt in the soviet union. You didnt resign from things. There was no culture for it. You just continued to serve, be promoted or demoted, but there was really very little personal choice involved in many of these things. So when he, in fact, handed in his resignation, it created an absolute firestorm. This was the first time anyone had suggested that he wanted to do Something Else with his life, so knowing at the time what that specific thing was. Cspan you mentioned earlier chautauqua, and you also mention a fellow in the book by the name of john wallach. Our audience has seen a lot of him. Where is chautauqua . What is it . And whos john wallach . Guest well, chautauqua is an institution that is more than 100 years old. Its located in new york state near well, in the sort of Southern Tier area near jamestown. And they have been holding these summer forums for, you know, as i say, a century or more. John wallach at the time was the Foreign Editor of hearst newspapers, and he was here in washington and had been serving as a Program Consultant to chautauqua for some time. And he had this brilliant idea of bringing the chautauqua process to the soviet union, to create this town hall meeting. The interesting thing is now you know, you look back from the perspective of all this change you know, were only talking about less than 10 years ago. And it was unheard of to put americans and soviets on television together in the soviet union. It had never been done before. The people who organized the conference, in fact, evaluated the project as a huge success for the simple fact that no one lost his job. Cspan your organization, again, is called the Eisenhower Institute . Guest well, thats where i was at the time. In fact, now i chair the center for postsoviet studies, which was started in 1991. But i must say that as my relationship with sagdeev deepened, here i was, as president of the Eisenhower World Affairs Institute, an organization named in my grandfathers memory, and just as roald thought he would have to leave his positions, i didnt see how i could in good conscience stay in my job and allow myself to cavort with a soviet citizen, and not any soviet citizen, at that. This, of course, was the drama of this for me was underscored by the fact that i was virtually the sole financial provider for my three children. So i really had to think through how i would support myself if it turned into a huge scandal. And that was a very complicated process, as a matter of fact. Cspan where were you born . Guest i was born in ft. Knox, kentucky, one of those marvelous army posts that my parents seemed to do with great frequency. My father was at the ar