He Let Gorbachev News Today : Breaking News, Live Updates & Top Stories | Vimarsana

To own in the world and to john mclaughlin's point we're in the troubled times now where america is not showing that leadership that is required in the world. >> you know, it could not have been a more complicated time not just for america or for the west, but for the entire globe. i remember talking to jim baker afterwards and i said, i was a little surprised that when the berlin wall came down that the president didn't go on television that night to acknowledge what had happened and claim a great victory for the west. and he said we didn't want to make it harder on gorbachev and it was alrea...

And he understood that. he didn't do it by bluster. often he did it by sort of holding back and letting the process move. >> he specifically said, howard fineman, he let gorbachev know he wasn't going to rub his nose it it but at the time of his re-election and his attempt at being re-elected, the failures in the economy, as would be the case today, seemed bigger and more important than the role that george h.w. bush had to play in the strengthening of nato and the west. >> right. i think his achievements in what i think will be recorded by historians as one of the great one-term presidencies....

Officials, we talked to the german intelligence service and to an individual that is kind of startling to remember this today, to an individual senior german official said that germany would not be united in our lifetime. and yet it was, about a year or 18 months later. and so at that moment, just to give you that as a example of the kind of bee fuddlement that existed in the world about where things were going, the east european countries were essentially coming apart. satellites in the soviet orbit for decades were beginning to strain under protest from the individuals that was to a degree s...

Poland, there was an election in 1989 that solidarity won and that sent a message across eastern europe you could get away with this because gorbachev did not stop is so he came in the midst of enormously complex times. >> john mclaughlin and tom brokaw and doris kaerns thank you for joining us for the perspective on the 41st president of the united states. next up, we'll show you how president bush handled the biggest political defeat of his life. >> and i did work hard. i gave it my all. gave it my best and got whipped. i went home. and boy, have they been happy. fwrs shaquem get in here. ...

>> well i think history is already kinder to president bush than the electorate was when he lost that election. i think it is the idea of the kind of leader he was, which performed such a mirror on our own times. you think about a man would was bred to a lifetime of honorable public service and history looks at where we are now and 30 years from now as they look back on him and the idea of public service being honorable and the statements that he made that he wants to do the most good and least harm and learned now to dwell on the great i am that was told from an early age to be humble and nev...