|
This is a story that you did not read in
the newspapers. At the Highest Levels reveals a hitherto
secret dimension of the most momentous event of our time:
the end of the Cold War. Beschloss and Talbott show us the
vital transactions that George Bush and Mikhail Gorbachev
made and concealed from the world: Bush's pledge not to
press Gorbachev for Baltic independence, the manipulations
for German unification, how the Soviet Union joined the
Gulf War coalition, Bush's private warnings to Gorbachev
that he was about to be overthrown, and the U.S. president's
secret efforts to prevent the breakup of the Soviet Union
and keep Gorbachev in power.
From early 1989, the two prizewinning authors
were granted unprecedented access to classified US and Soviet
documents, cables, telephone transcripts, and diplomatic
records, on the condition that they not publish the information
before the end of 1992. Such was their access that in the
final days before the Soviet Union's collapse, as they relate
in this book, Beschloss and Talbott were asked by a Gorbachev
confidant to convey to President Bush a private message
about Gorbachev's fate under Boris Yeltsin.
With novelistic detail and intimacy, At
the Highest Levels shows Bush and Gorbachev behind closed
doors as they fence with domestic foes and suspicious allies.
It demonstrates how the two leaders came to believe that
their most dangerous opponents were no longer each other
but forces inside their own countries. As Beschloss and
Talbott argue, the two leaders' excessive reliance on each
other contributed to Gorbachev's fall from power in December
1991 and Bush's own collapse less than a year later.
Michael R. Beschloss is an award-winning
historian and the author of Kennedy and Roosevelt: The
Uneasy Alliance (1980), Mayday: Eisenhower, Khruschev
and the U-2 Affair (1986), and The Crisis Years:
Kennedy and Khruschev, 1960-1963 (1991). He has held
appointments in history at St. Antony's College (Oxford),
the Smithsonian Institution, and the Harvard Russian Research
Center. He served as chief CNN on-air analyst during every
major world event described in At the Highest Levels,
from the Bush inauguration and the Bush-Gorbachev summits
through the August 1991 coup and Gorbachev's resignation.
Strobe Talbott is editor at large and
foreign affairs columnist for Time
magazine. Born in Dayton, Ohio, he was educated at Hotchkiss,
Yale, and Oxford, where he was a Rhodes scholar. He joined
Time
as a correspondent in Eastern Europe. Before assuming his
present post, he covered the State Department, the White
House, and the intelligence community and was the magazine's
Washington bureau chief for five years. He is the translator-editor
of two volumes of Nikita Khruschev's memoirs as well as
the author of three books on the history of nuclear arms
control and two books on U.S.-Soviet relations.
|
