Can critique that manuscript before it is too late . We have all been there when our book has come out and you participate in a panel and people always say, you should have done this, you should have done that. Today, we do have one of the worlds leading scholars, jeff engel, who i will say a word about first. Jeff is presenting his manuscript very much in progress. The title is when the world seemed new george h. W. Bush and the end of the cold war. Jeff is an associate professor of history and the director of the center for president ial history at Southern Methodist university. He is the author of numerous books. Two of the most recent include into the desert and the fall of the berlin wall. And we are really fortunate to have jeff with us. He is going to say a few words about his manuscript. He put a few chapters of it up online. I know that some of you had a chance to look at it. Ira said, you really should get a practitioner, someone who knows a thing or two about how government actually works. We are fortunate to have just the right person in this case. That is 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 am not mistaken about my history. He also has experience with bush i. He was his deputy chief of staff and secretary of transportation for george h. W. Bush. Mr. Card is currently the executive director in the office of the provost at texas a m university. Thank goodness that johnny mann zeal 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 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 lot of books, and even more very influential articles. Some of his most recent books are everybody ought to be rich. And rise and fall of modern american conservatism. Thank you for joining us today, david. Commenting last, but certainly not least, is melani mcalister, who is an associate professor of american studies, International Affairs, and media and Public Affairs and she is also the chair of her department, american studies, at George Washington university. Melani is the author of epic encounters, culture, media, and the u. S. Interest in the middle east since 1945. She is also the coeditor with Marie Griffin of religion and politics in the contemporary United States. Ira, i know you are watching like a hawk, this webcast, along with several other people. So we, i think, are fulfilling not only our obligation to dream mentors, but a dream panel for your idea of a manuscript review. Without further a do, i am going to hand things over to jeff. Take it away. Thank you, brian. It is traditional, at this particular moment, to say how pleased the speaker is to be here. I have to admit that last night was the nfl draft and i was only expecting my way to be winging my way to a new city at this point. But there is also around two and three coming up, so i have hope still. Let me begin by thanking brian and Evan Mccormick and everyone here for this tremendous opportunity. It is a wonderful opportunity for me to get important feedback at the precise moment when it is most useful, i think. I also want to say that it is wonderful to be here at the Miller Center again because this is one of the institutions that is a model for how the academy of policymaking can come together and Work Together and move forward together. Having just founded a new center for history at smu, i can tell you a number of times where an issue came up, and idea came up, and we say, how does the Miller Center do it . Because they do it well. [inaudible] we should courtney on that. Coordinate on that. Let me also take thank the panel for taking the time out. I am going to do two things in my brief commentary. I am told to speak for about 10 minutes or so. My wife says i cannot clear my throat in 10 minutes, so we will see how far i get on this. First am i will give you a little bit of discussion about what the book is about, how the book is set up, the methodologies involved and the areas i am trying to cover. Then i will tell you a little bit about george w. Bush george h. W. Bush. The book tries to do several things at once. It is simultaneously a study of u. S. Foreignpolicy during the tumultuous end of the cold war. It is also simultaneously a group biography, looking primarily at george h. W. Bush. For the rest of the talk, whenever i mention president bush, i am referring to 41. Him and those around him, and those around him, the collective biography of America National securitys decisionmaking during this period. It also tries to situate american policymaking within a broader international milia. Milieu. Time and again, we go over events that occurred during 1989 through 1991 that were not generated by the United States. The United States was reactive during these times. One of the arguments that i make is that this is the essence of president bushs policymaking and his foreignpolicy as a whole was to be cautious and reactive, realistically reactive without being too overly exuberant in reacting to foreign events. Because there were dramatic foreign events going on through this period. It is important to recall all that occurred during the four years of the bush residency. This has to include the end of the cold war with ensuing events such as the fall of the berlin wall, the breakup of the soviet empire, the breakup of the soviet union itself. We also have events on the other side. We have things like tiananmen square, which was ultimately met by repression and force. We also have a democratic invasion of panama. We also have the gulf war. We also have independence going on in south africa. Not only the gulf war, but further difficulties in the middle east visavis ethnic cleansing. Speaking of ethnic cleansing, we have the beginning of the tragedy that was postcold war yugoslavia. Looking at these events, it is astounding to think that all of them occurred within the same 4 years. I would make the argument that more accord more occurred during president bushs tenure in u. S. Office then faced any other president in u. S. History, with the exception of maybe fdr during the height of world war ii. During east during each of these events, president bush and his staff adopted what i like to call hippocratic democracy. That is thomas first, do no harm. A world was, to their minds, going in the proper direction. Democracy was on the rise. Markets were on the rise. The soviet union and communism work fairly on the decline. Were clearly on the decline. What would happen when this decline occurred was something no one could put their finger on. Bob gates, who went on to become secretary of dispense of defense, was Deputy National security advisor and gates who had trained as an historian, was fond of going around the white house and telling everybody that he could that never in Human History had a massive empire collapsed without a major war ensuing. Consequently, when people in the white house saw the soviet union begin to collapse, they feared the next step in that logical chain. At every step, it ministration would approach their difficulties by thinking to themselves not what can we do, but how can we promote stability . How can we keep things, which are already going in the right direction, continuing to go in the right direction without speeding them up to the point where they derail or perhaps doing something to stop the process of change, which is going in the right direction . Time and time again, i come back to a quote uttered by otto von bismarck decades before. Who said, and i will quote directly, the stream of time flows inexorably along. By plunging my hand into it, i am merely doing my duty. I do not expect, thereby, to change its course. What he is telling us here is that the move is moving in a direction. Policymakers might attend to change things, but they are never going to change the current. A are never going to change the flow. This is something which president bush, though i never heard him quote bismarck, something that he believed in a lady that the world was going in the right direction and that the only thing that he could do as president of the United States was to make sure that we continued on that path without hitting the rocks along the way. In fact, to give you a singular example of this, president bush was pilloried in the press during the initial aftermath of the fall of the berlin wall. An aftermath which was covered on National Television to great acclaim, which people around the world saw celebrations occurring that no one particularly ever imagined even weeks before could have occurred peacefully. And president bush invited, at one point, reporters into the office to witness him watching these events on tv as he was watching them in realtime. He was leaning back at his desk and cbs leslie stall says to him, you just do not seem excited. The culmination of the entire halfcentury cold war effort, we won and you do not seem excited. He responded in a very important way. He said, well, i guess i am not just an excitable guy. That was not actually the truth of why he was trying to lay down his excitement. Later on, he did point out that one of the great things about dynamic change is that it is all moving in our direction. He did not want to change direction. In fact, he knew something which the other reporters in the room did not, which was that he had spent the previous night and hours on the telephone with Margaret Thatcher, cole, and gorbachev, who pleaded with him not to do anything. The great concern for all of these leaders at the time was that this excitement of the crowd would get out of hand. That violence would ensue. That no one could control this incredible change. Each of them had in the back of their minds a singular example of violence of celebration going too far and being turned into violence by those who thought it had gone too far, which, of course, was tiananmen square, which only happened once before. At the time, president bush and his staff suggested, let us not go too far in celebrating those who are democratizing from the streets up. Let us not go too far in celebrating reformers because those reformers have enemies and those enemies, i. E. Those in control of the communist state, have tanks and guns and we can see and we have seen what can happen when they get pushed too far. Ultimately, the great fear of the administration was that those conservatives in the communist world would react to remove gorbachev, tried to push the world forward through reform. Of course, we see this coming true in august of 1991. At that point, with a very low likelihood of success, the fear that that could generate into civil war and Ethnic Violence and the like. I argue that there are only two moments when president bush essentially took off the hippocratic gloves, if you will, and decided to push forward with initiatives. The first was reunification of germany. He believed that the reunification of germany was necessary in order to keep future stability in europe. Having nato in europe allowed americans to also stay in europe. He believed firmly that the only thing that had truly cap the peace was the american president. He pushed hard for reunification on the terms they needed, which was keeping germany in nato. The second one was the gulf war. This strikes me as a moment where we see the end of the cold war. We see two things, first, the soviets coming along with the International Community in a way they had never done before, working with britain and france and the United States on a central issue of importance to all of them, the security of the middle east. Secondly, this is the one where president bush begins to lay out what the world would look like after the cold war. It is the first time he has been willing to admit that the cold war is over. And then we come to the final point which i will make today which is what the world order came to mean. In many ways, this is a phrase that has been deemed by historians as being somewhat hollow, that there was nothing the within bushs new world order. I think this is the central idea that is driven the administration, that change is moving in the right direction. If we look at the tenet of the new world order, it was not to suggest that the world was going to be perfect, but rather better. More just, more free, more secure, not just free and secure, but more so. Ultimately, that the world would be able to take the opportunity which had been afforded it before the cold war even occurred. President bushs vision for the postcold war world was something that had never been created because of the cold war. With that, i want to thank my commandeers once more and let them begin to pillory me. Thank you. [applause] my name is andy card and i am an engineer by training, a politician by disease, and not an academic. I am barely called a practitioner, but i have been blessed to be invited to read just a manuscript to read jeffs manuscript and i found it to be very good. I think it is mistitled. It is more of a biography than it is just a description of the end of the cold war. But i loved the biographical information and i do think it is instructive to understanding what made george h. W. Bush the man that he is. So i loved the trip down memory lane and i loved reading about the most respected individuals i have met in my experience in government and politics, and that is george h. W. Bush. I will also say that the instructive part of the book is the relationships that jeff has shown the president developed over a long. Of time over a long period of time, especially those who had to counsel him as he dealt with 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. I think that is part of what jeff has put together. He has shown that the collection of advisors that were helping president bush manage a process that was really not part of the political catalyst the political calculus when they entered into government long before president bush became president. I do not think they anticipated that the soviet union would change the but the wisdom that they had in understanding it and dealing with it was invaluable. I think that was how you develop 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 amerco was functioning or not functioning at the same time. The president had to wrestle with unbelievably fabulous opportunities. I do agree that he came at that opportunity with a desire not to manage it, but to invite its continuance. And so it was phenomenally restraining for any leader to say, this is going in the right direction. I do not 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 do not want that to happen. Having said that, i want to know where the shoals are. If the ship is heading into the shoals, i would like somebody to tell me so i can pull the tiller a little bit and see if we can avoid the shoals. I think that description is really personified with james a. Baker the third and colin powell, who helped bring a breath of experience and observations and helped make a difference. And there were others as well. Some the president did not want to invite to be around him at first. I like how jeff describes each strained relationship the strained relationship with the former secretary of state, who was quite prominent and is still quite prominent in the dialogue of dynamic change in the world. And yet that wisdom, i think, was facilitated in dealing with people who shared that view. President bush, i do believe, was that the cost of change cusp of change of philosophy in the white house at the same time that he was on the cusp of change with the world powers, if you will. And it does not look very dramatic going from reagan to bush. I am not sure it was really dramatic, but it was a change. His views were very different than his predecessors views, george schultz. The views of the foreignpolicy community when president reagan was dealing with the opportunity for change that had already started to emerge from gorbachev and that comes through in just book in jeffs book, too. The seeds of change were actually planted overseas by others and he wondered how wellfertilized they would be or when they would be watered or when they would produce beautiful flowers or whether it would produce weeds. The seeds themselves were not our seeds. I think they were invited by our government and how our government functions of, by, and for the people and how our economy thrives through entrepreneurship and creativity and the courage to take risks. 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 did not that somebody did not round up the seeds. I think that is what president bush did very well and he did it by having the benefit of counsel from lots of different people who did not all share the same view, except the same commitment. I think that was of great benefit to the president and i think that is 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 am anxious to turn on the radio and this dates me but i used up love listening to paul harvey, the rest of the story. I want to know what the rest of the story is. 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 dc and in other capitals, especially in europe. Especially when you consider that europe was trying to give itself a position definition as an entity rather than the sovereign definition of its members. That was a strained time in the relationship between the british and the french wait a minute, it is always a strained relationship. But it was particularly strained at this time.