Word: beschloss
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...current climate is between the White House and the military, Clinton's problems are not unique. "Almost every President has had trouble with the military and the Chiefs," says presidential historian Michael Beschloss. John Kennedy's war-hero status could not protect him from criticism when he refused to provide air cover for the Bay of Pigs landing. Lyndon Johnson's Joint Chiefs threatened a mass resignation over his policy of graduated escalation in Vietnam. And Dwight Eisenhower's five stars provided no cover when he tried to cut the Air Force budget. "When budgets go up, Presidents get along...
Like other journalistic histories, this one is based on unnamed sources, but Beschloss, a diplomatic historian, and Talbott, a former TIME columnist who will be coordinating the Clinton Administration's policy toward Russia and the rest of the former Soviet Union, seem to avoid the pitfall -- common to this kind of work -- of overreliance on a single source...
Their book does suffer, however, from the other disability of this genre. Whether out of caution or out of deference to their sources, Beschloss and % Talbott stand on the sidelines as the narrative unfolds, interjecting their assessment of Bush and Gorbachev's diplomacy only in a brief epilogue...
Their treatment of Bush's diplomacy is particularly problematic. While the authors conclude that Bush "made an indispensable contribution to the cold war's end," their story suggests quite another, more controversial, conclusion. Beschloss and Talbott portray Bush as an unreflective status quo conservative who found himself extremely uncomfortable with the revolution taking place in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. After a September 1989 meeting with Soviet Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze, Bush told his National Security Adviser, Brent Scowcroft, "It's tempting to say, 'Wouldn't it be great if the Soviet empire broke up?' But that...
...empire, but not entirely by design. Bush's instinctive opposition to democratic reform in Eastern Europe and secession in the Soviet Union allowed Gorbachev to believe that in abandoning Eastern Europe and forgoing force in the Baltics, he was not surrendering to the U.S. in the cold war. From Beschloss and Talbott's own account, the best that can be said of Bush and Gorbachev is that they both succeeded by failing gracefully...