Volume 36, Number 12 · July 20, 1989
The Emperor's Clothes
By McGeorge Bundy
Minds at War: Nuclear Reality and the Inner Conflicts of Defense Policymakers
by Steven Kull
Basic Books, 341 pp., $19.95
The summer of 1989 finds us in a time of new hopes for the strengthening of a stable peace between the Soviet Union and the West. After a slow and overcautious beginning, George Bush has decided that he did not like that beginning, and has set a new course just in time to win the strong support of his colleagues in the NATO Summit at the end of May. He has also plainly impressed the government of Mikhail Gorbachev, whose contribution to our new hopes remains the larger, if only because the need for basic change has always been larger in Moscow. Most of all, Bush has succeeded in explaining his new course in language that was most persuasive where it was most obviously his own. His most convincing demonstration was in a long interview with The Washington Post, published on June 2; I will return to it.
Review, 4137 words
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