Book Review: An honest insider

It's not often that a top-level official publicly admits he was wrong on an important issue of international diplomacy and ethics. But Strobe Talbott, in an engrossing and highly readable memoir of Russian-American relations in the 1990s, confesses that he was wrong about Chechnya ("The Russia Hand: A Memoir of Presidential Diplomacy," Random House, 455 pages, $29.95).

When the Russian military launched its ferocious assaults against the breakaway Muslim province in the Caucasus, Vice President Al Gore gave Moscow an implicit go-ahead, calling it "an internal matter."

"The statement was ill advised, and I was one of the advisers responsible for it," Talbott admits in his memoir of eight years as the Clinton administration's point man on Russia.

"What we failed to see was that the latest eruption of violence brought to the surface of Russian politics the single worst and most characteristic feature of the old regime, and the single most dangerous temptation for the new regime: a reliance on raw force as the solution to all problems," Talbott writes.

Talbott does not excuse himself for the bad advice, but his book provides the essential context in which it was given. The Clinton administration was dealing with an unprecedented problem, with a nuclear superpower whose sustaining military, industrial and economic power were all simultaneously in meltdown. And in Boris Yeltsin, it was led by a capricious and alcoholic leader who was nonetheless the only available guarantor of the shift to democracy that was Russia's best long-term hope.

The worst did not happen. Russia did not lash out in a last nuclear spasm. It did not sink into sullen hostility to the United States, or collapse into mass starvation unleashing waves of refugees. It was often -- even in its old spheres of influence in the Balkans and Middle East -- a helpful diplomatic player.

In the most arresting and insightful single passage in the book, Talbott gives us a kind of explanation, that the personal relationship between Bill and Boris had become the crucial stabilizer in an inherently unstable relationship. And this relationship worked because they each recognized that the other was the same kind of person.

"I suspected there was more to his (Clinton's) affinity with Yeltsin that being approximately the same height and shape and shoe size, or being the leaders of two countries that could blow up the world, or being fellow politicians who had to contend with obstreperous legislatures and hostile media," Talbott suggests.

"The key, as I saw it, might be that Yeltsin combined prodigious determination and fortitude with grotesque indiscipline and a kind of genius for self-abasement. He was both a very big man and a very bad boy, a natural leader and an incurable screw-up. All this Clinton recognized, found easy to forgive, and wanted others to join him in forgiving."

Other commentators have toyed with this idea of Bill and Boris, the excellent adventure of two semi-delinquent teenagers who happened to rule half the world. It takes someone of Talbott's access and credentials to nail it. There are five reasons why Talbott may be the person best equipped to describe the extraordinary relationship that developed between Presidents Clinton and Yeltsin in the 1990s, a period that saw America's wealth and power rise to unmatched heights while Russia's capabilities fell almost as dramatically.

First, Talbott was there, first as the special envoy to Russia of his old friend and Oxford University roommate Clinton, and then as deputy secretary of state. Second, Talbott is a notable Russian scholar, who speaks the language not just fluently but elegantly, and spent much of that time at Oxford translating Khrushchev's memoirs for Time magazine. Third, as Time's top foreign policy analyst in the 1980s, Talbott is a world class reporter, with high-level contacts and a deserved reputation for being fast, accurate and reliable. Fourth, he is a serious historian, who co-authored a magisterial account of the Cold War endgame with presidential historian Michael Beschloss. Fifth, he is one of a handful of policy wonks on strategic nuclear arms, author of the best book on the 1980s arms control negotiations "Deadly Gambits."

But "The Russia Hand" will go down as Talbott's best and most important book, one that will be as important to future historians as it is informative today. This is not just a contender for being the best recent memoir of a political insider; it is also unique, a book of instant history and analysis that is so close to the action and the key players, and so deeply informed, that only Talbott could have written it. Add in the fact that Talbott admits that he sometimes got it wrong, and this is as honest as it is useful, a very rare book indeed.