Comrades Of History

By JOHN B. JUDIS John B. Judis, a contributing editor to The New Republic, is the author of Grand Illusion: Critics and Champions of the American Century.

TITLE: AT THE HIGHEST LEVELS

AUTHORS: MICHAEL R. BESCHLOSS AND STROBE TALBOTT

PUBLISHER: LITTLE, BROWN; 498 PAGES; $24.95

THE BOTTOM LINE: An unparalleled glimpse at the making of foreign policy.

Michael R. Beschloss and Strobe Talbott describe in unprecedented detail, replete with private conversations and secret memoranda, three years of negotiations between George Bush and Mikhail Gorbachev -- talks that climaxed in the end of the cold war. No one has ever given as complete and compelling an account of the higher reaches of foreign policy -- particularly only a year after the events themselves have concluded.

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's not really practical or smart, is it?"

Bush was initially distrustful of Gorbachev and critical of Ronald Reagan's "sentimental" attachment to him, but ended up by clinging irrationally to Gorbachev to the exclusion of his rival, Boris Yeltsin, whom he dismissed as an unruly boor. From the authors' account, Bush got no help at all from his top advisers Scowcroft and Robert Gates, who offered him unremittingly bad advice about what was happening in the Soviet Union. In Bush's first year, Scowcroft warned that in Gorbachev, the U.S. faced the "clever bear syndrome." Then two years later he portrayed Gorbachev as a Soviet Lincoln standing against forces of Soviet secession, while chiding junior CIA analysts for "pushing Yeltsin."

Bush, whose disposition and advice put him perpetually one step behind events, never did achieve his objectives of keeping Gorbachev in power and the Soviet empire intact, if only as a federation. Bush did facilitate the peaceful dissolution of the 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.