An excerpt from The New York Times review of When the World Seemed New
Written by Jacob Heilbrunn
Yearning for an Earlier Era of American Diplomacy
In May 1989, as the Soviet empire was imploding, President George H.W. Bush delivered a commencement speech at Texas A&M University declaring that the moment had arrived to move “beyond containment” and expressing the hope that the Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev’s policy of perestroika would succeed. A day earlier, however, someone in his administration had wanted to deliver a very different message. “Buried deep in the archives of the Bush administration,” Jeffrey A. Engel reports in “When the World Seemed New,”rests an address that Bush’s defense secretary Dick Cheney had drafted that breathed fire about the unrelenting Soviet threat: “It would be supreme folly to quit the struggle on what may well be the eve of a less threatening world.” The White House put the kibosh on it. A few weeks later Bush prepared to visit Eastern Europe. “Whatever this trip is, it is not a victory tour with me running around over therepounding my chest,” he instructed his speechwriters. “I don’t want to sound inflammatory or provocative,” and “I don’t want to put a stick in Gorbachev’s eye.”
Engel, the director of the Center for Presidential History at Southern Methodist University and the editor of “The China Diary of George H.W. Bush,” is an assiduous researcher and vivid writer who has conducted numerous interviews with leading Bush administration officials. To read his account of the administration’s foreign policy is to yearn for an earlier era of American diplomacy, when blarney about the nation’s omnipotence was not permitted to substitute for realistic prudence…