Word: strobes
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LAST THURSDAY, THE FIRST FULL DAY OF BILL CLINTON'S presidency, Strobe Talbott found himself at a strange juncture: in the lobby of the State Department, speaking from the pay phone he had used for years to file stories to TIME. But now he was on his own turf. Two days earlier, Clinton had nominated him to be ambassador at large and special adviser to the Secretary of State on the new independent states, a position in which he will help formulate and carry out the Administration's policy toward the former Soviet Union...
...Strobe had crossed over to the other side after 22 years as a journalist, and part of him still could not believe he had made the journey. "This is a bolt out of the blue," he said. "I never expected to be in government, never aspired to be in government. It's a classic example of an offer I could not refuse...
...While Strobe has gone from being an editor at large to being an ambassador at large, the focus of his attention has not changed. He is one of the country's foremost experts on Russia and the other states of the former U.S.S.R. He learned Russian at Hotchkiss, majored in Russian literature at Yale, and wrote a master's thesis on that subject at Oxford. Clinton first witnessed Talbott's expertise 24 years ago when he and Strobe, both Rhodes scholars, shared a sparsely furnished row house at Oxford University. Clinton often recalled watching Strobe translate Nikita Khrushchev's memoirs...
...addition to translating and editing two volumes of Khrushchev's memoirs, Strobe has written five books on the relationship between the Soviet Union and the U.S. His sixth, At the Highest Levels -- The Inside Story of the End of the Cold War, co-authored with historian Michael Beschloss, will be published by Little, Brown this month...
...Strobe, Clinton gains a fellow wonk, someone with whom he can continue to talk about the mysteries of this nation's superpower rival. "He always had a voracious curiosity about the Soviet empire and the problems it posed to the world," says Strobe. "And I always suspected that it was in part because he hoped that one day he would be dealing with them." TIME will miss Strobe, but our loss will be the country's gain...