Statecraft: The Bush 41 Team

♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ [ Rhythmic clapping ] ♪♪ [ People yelling in German ] ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ -The Cold War really dominated global politics from 1945 up until really up until 1989.

This was an incredibly volatile period where governments felt at risk, where civil war could break out, where nuclear weapons are involved.

-Imagine a situation where you've had for over 40 years an enemy that threatened their very existence of your country not only militarily, but ideologically.

-We had about 350,000 American troops in Europe.

We had a large number of nuclear weapons.

We had large numbers of chemical weapons.

And the Russians had deployed forces that dwarfed ours.

-We were committed to maintaining a very high state of readiness on a day-to-day basis.

Ready to fight right now immediately.

-This is perhaps the most unstable moment in global history.

I'm frankly amazed that we survived.

-The Cold War didn't have to end peacefully.

It could have ended with a bang.

Most people thought it was going to end with a bang.

[ Explosion ] ♪♪ -President Bush's entire career, as it were, happened, almost coeval with the Cold War.

It begins and ends with the beginning and the end of the Cold War.

And I think most people are aware of the fact that Bush was a very young fighter pilot.

-He begins his early adult life, really late teenage years as a combat pilot in World War II.

-I was hit about halfway down a run.

The plane was on fire, cockpit filled up with smoke.

I had two men in the back of the plane, landed in the Pacific and fairly close to the Japanese-held island.

And I didn't know what was going to happen for a couple of hours.

And then out of the -- out of the sea came a periscope and then a submarine.

And thank God it turned out to be ours.

Today, 40 some years later, it doesn't seem like it all happened.

And yet it in a sense, it's been a very, very internal and important part of my life.

-That's got to have an impact on a future president who knows what it's like to be under fire.

-He went to Yale and got married and was a junior in college, basically when the Cold War began.

-For the rest of his adult life, he is a public servant in the midst of the Cold War.

-I want these children of mine to live in peace and in a nation that stands tall and proud and strong in the eyes of the rest of the free world.

-Everything happens in the next 20 or 30 years takes place with this as an important backdrop.

-He then goes through these periods of appointed office where he is our ambassador to the U.N.

He becomes the party head of the Republican Party.

He serves as our envoy to China.

-And this is a man who had a deep history, almost unparalleled history in American foreign policy and the intelligence community and as Vice President.

-At 1:00 today, in about 50 minutes, President Reagan and President-elect George Bush will be meeting with Mikhail Gorbachev.

-Mikhail Gorbachev comes to power in the Soviet Union, demanding or really offering change.

-He was an international celebrity.

He had a dynamism that had captured excitement, certainly in Europe, but also in the United States.

-Gorbachev bewildered us.

He gives a speech at the United Nations and announces unilaterally that he's going to cut the Soviet armed forces by 500,000 troops.

Shocking.

-George Bush, Mikhail Gorbachev and Ronald Reagan meet on Governors Island, and George Bush is frankly standoffish.

For one thing, he's still the president-elect and he is very deferential still to Ronald Reagan.

-Mr. Vice President, your reaction to the decision?

-Bush wasn't sure.

I mean, is this a real transformation?

Is it showmanship?

Is it designed to put us at a disadvantage or is this a transformation?

Are we going to see the end of the Cold War?

[ Cheers and applause ] -American presidents are judged and measured by history, not by the issues they bring into office, but how they deal with the great crises that roll into their path.

The foreign affairs crises, the wars, that kind of measure of George Bush was tailor-made.

[ Camera shutter clicks ] -The people of the world agitate for free expression and free thought through the door to the moral and intellectual satisfactions that only liberty allows.

We know what works.

Freedom works.

We know what's right.

Freedom is right.

-George Bush comes into office and brings with him one of the most experienced foreign-policy teams the country has ever seen.

-The Gang of Eight starts with the Gang of Four, if you will, President, the Vice President, Chief of Staff, and the National Security Advisor -- Brent Scowcroft, myself, the President, Dan Quayle.

After inauguration, the group of four added Jimmy Baker.

Occasionally Bob Gates came in.

And as soon as Cheney became Secretary of Defense, Cheney was brought in.

We eventually started bringing in Colin Powell.

-The Bush foreign-policy team is seen as the gold standard of foreign-policy teams.

They were quite experienced with one another, but they were also very wise in the world.

-To my mind, when you talk about statecraft, you are talking about somebody who understands your interests, your values, brings them together and negotiates with an adversary or even sometimes with an ally to come together around a common vision of how you're going to move forward diplomatically.

-The essence of statecraft is using all the tools available to you to pursue your objectives.

-I'd like to think that one can learn something from the arts of diplomacy, the use of power, how you work with allies.

I remember once Bush sits down for a one-on-one and I'm the notetaker with President Mitterrand.

And President Bush says to Francois, he said, "You know, you know so much about the Middle East.

You have such a good sense of history.

Tell me what you think is happening."

45 minutes later, I find that my hand is sort of freezing up because Mitterrand's been talking about this.

Now, what -- what -- Why did Bush do that?

He's paying respect to Mitterrand.

He's learning.

He's getting a sense of sort of Mitterrand's position.

But this is not someone who's always telling somebody else what to do.

-He took enormous time to build these relationships with these people and he built trust.

-He really, more than any other president in American history, loved to call his foreign counterparts.

-And it really was very funny at the very beginning, because the first time he tried to call Gorbachev, the first time he tried to call Deng Xiaoping, they all thought it was a fake crank call.

So it took a few exercises to sort of get these other leaders accustomed to the fact that the President of the United States actually was on the line.

-He made sure to call these people routinely when he had no ask.

Because then when he wanted something, there was a basis there.

There was a relationship.

-Mingo, a little warmer today.

How are you?

Come on in.

This is kind of a little private nook.

[ Music playing ] -Isn't that great?

They built -- Well, they built this desk because I still like to type and everything.

-Working for Bush in the White House during that time was just so damn much fun because it was such a great group of people and his leadership and vision was so great.

-The Bush people come in, they correctly actually recognize that just continuing the status quo won't work.

The Reagan people don't really have any pending new ideas on the table that are very good.

They need to actually craft a whole set of new ideas and some ways more ambitious ideas.

-The review of U.S. Soviet relations that my administration has just completed outlines a new path toward resolving this struggle.

Our goal is bold, more ambitious than any of my predecessors could have thought possible.

-There was always a commitment to being bold in the changes that we were going to propose, and it was it was Brent Scowcroft that led in terms of the magnitude of the change the President would propose.

[ Camera shutter clicks ] -I have chosen as my National Security Advisor, Brent Scowcroft.

He understands the White House.

He understands the military, the State Department, the way the Hill works, and the intelligence community as well.

Where do you get these things?

That's good.

-Brent Scowcroft was probably the President's favorite staff member.

-He had a great sense of humor.

He worked from 6:00 in the morning till 11:00 every night.

-George Bush used to tease Brent Scowcroft all the time, claiming that he nodded off during cabinet meetings or nodded off on Air Force One.

And Brent did.

-They were personal friends from the Ford administration.

And Scowcroft had experience leading the national security structure for President Ford.

-Here's this guy whose fingerprints are all over everything but who doesn't want to be in the public eye, who gets very little attention.

-Have a joint leadership meeting.

You can talk about Nicaragua and really the triumph of your strategy and congratulate the Congress on really a bipartisan effort here.

I came in with a fairly specific notion of what to do, and that was to change our policy toward the Soviet Union, which had been one based on arms control to a policy focused primarily on Eastern Europe.

[ People chanting in foreign language ] [ Cheers and applause ] -And I said what we ought to do is focus and give the most help and encouragement to those who are trying most to liberalize their internal systems.

-We could tell things were beginning to move in Poland.

-It is fascinating the change that is going on there.

And we should be positioned, and I'm going there to tell the rest of the leaders, "We want to work with you."

Poland is making its own history, and America and the whole world is watching.

-President said, "Tell the ambassador I'd like to host a lunch."

Members of the Solidarity had been invited.

Jaruzelski had been invited.

And I started to have a conversation with the gentleman on my right.

And as I'm talking to him, a gentleman across the table stands up and "I don't think you remember me.

You put me into prison."

And the minister looked at him and looked at him and he says, "Yes, but remember, I gave you a very good cell."

That kind of a conversation is taking place at every table.

It really was from that lunch that the coalition in Poland was developed.

-A year ago in Poland, Lech Walesa declared that he was ready to open a dialogue with the Communist rulers of that country.

And today, with the future of a free Poland in their own hands, members of Solidarity lead the Polish government.

[ Applause ] -How do you like this room?

-Beautiful.

-Isn't it?

You know what that chandelier is?

It's a replica of the chandelier in the Blue Mosque in Istanbul.

[ Camera shutter clicks ] -The team that served George H.W.

Bush was really led by Secretary Jim Baker.

-Jim Baker comes here as a corporate lawyer.

Within one year, he's going from a relatively obscure political appointment at the Commerce Department to running the campaign of the incumbent president of the United States, Gerry Ford.

He was also not only White House Chief of Staff for Ronald Reagan, but still considered the gold standard of White House Chiefs of Staff.

All that experience leads up to becoming Secretary of State at this incredible hinge point in history.

-It's well known that the new Secretary of State is my friend.

I have great confidence in him.

-I hope that in foreign policy, we're going to make a better team than we oftentimes did on the tennis courts in Texas.

-Baker and Bush, before they were partners on the public stage, they were friends and they weren't just acquaintances.

They were really pretty much best friends.

-From my own personal standpoint, I was extraordinarily fortunate.

I had a 40-year friend as my President, and I ran all of his campaigns and he was my daughter's godfather.

There was never any doubt in my mind that if he called upon me, I would be -- I would be there.

He did so much for me, and he was my real close friend.

-It might be that they're the first really close friends to have occupied the positions of Secretary of State and President since Madison and Jefferson.

-"The Berlin Wall separated the world of oppression from the world of freedom.

President George H.W.

Bush and Secretary of State James A. Baker, III led America's foreign policy during this revolutionary time and during the subsequently successful effort to unify Germany in peace and freedom."

-The Berlin Wall in many ways epitomized the East-West conflict.

It epitomized the tyranny of communism.

It was a wall designed not to keep people out but to keep people in.

Before 1989, you basically had Europe, in particular, split in two.

You had a western half, which was Democratic leaning, and then you had an eastern half, which is really best understood as the Soviet empire.

After World War II, the Soviet Union controlled most of Eastern Europe and continued to set up basically pro-Moscow communist regimes.

Every 20 years or so, someone within Eastern Europe decided that perhaps we want to go in a different direction.

-Ferment would grow.

There would be an uprising.

The Soviets would clamp down the dissidents who would be killed or dispersed, and there would be repression for a decade or so, and then the cycle would be repeated.

-The difference between those earlier eras and what happened after 1989 is that change came from the center.

In the late 1980s, Mikhail Gorbachev announces that every state in the Warsaw Pact can choose its own path forward.

They called that the Sinatra doctrine.

That is to say, Frank Sinatra famously said, "I did it my way."

Well, Gorbachev told every state, "Go do it your way."

-Early this morning, Hungary drew back the Iron Curtain and thousands of East Germans are now rushing through.

Over the next few weeks, Hungarian officials expect that as many as 60,000 East Germans may vote with their feet and for freedom in the West.

-No one in their right mind thought the Berlin Wall was going to fall in November of 1989.

It was a complete mistake and a misspoken mistake by the government press officer.

The spokesperson reaches into his folder, pulls out the documents that he was not supposed to read and reads them wrong.

In essence, the Berlin Wall is open.

-As a matter of fact, we didn't even know the wall had fallen.

Brent's secretary called and said, "The President wants to know what's going on in Berlin."

We were really busy.

We weren't watching television.

We said, "What's going on in Berlin?"

She said, "Turn on CNN."

There the wall was falling.

[ Cheers and applause ] ♪♪ ♪♪ -The President understood that this was a tough moment for Gorbachev, understood the hard liners in the Soviet Union would consider this an embarrassment for the Soviet Union.

And he knew it created a very precarious situation for Gorbachev.

-It was tense in Moscow.

Can you imagine?

Put yourself in Gorbachev's position.

Some of President Bush's advisers, political advisers, said, "You got to go over to Berlin right now and to celebrate this victory."

He just said, "Are you kidding me?

If I do that, we could have World War III."

"Mr. President, you have got to go to Berlin for Truman.

You have to go to Berlin for Reagan.

You have to go to Berlin for Kennedy, for all of your predecessors have stood by freedom for Germany."

He said, "And what would I do when I got there?

Dance on the wall?"

He said, "This is a German moment, not an American moment."

-When Marlin Fitzwater, Bush's press secretary, comes into the office and says, "Mr. President, you really do need to say something," Bush finally agrees, goes into the Oval Office.

They bring reporters in to surround his desk.

Brent Scowcroft sitting on one side, James Baker sitting on the other.

-Our objective is a Europe whole and free.

And is it a step towards that?

I would say yes.

-I was sitting right there at the right side of his desk.

All the reporters came in and said, "Why are you so unemotional?"

He said, "Well, I'm just not an emotional kind of guy."

-You don't seem elated, and I'm wondering if you're thinking -- -I'm elated.

I'm just not an emotional kind of guy.

-He knew that he shouldn't be out there pounding his chest and sticking it in the eye of Gorbachev and Shevardnadze.

We still had a lot to do.

-The fact that I'm not bubbling over, maybe it's -- maybe it's getting along towards the evening because I feel very good about it.

-When the Berlin Wall falls then, everything changes.

If this scar across the heart of Europe could suddenly be removed overnight, not just removed by a government, but removed by the people themselves, well, frankly, that meant anything was possible.

-When the wall came down, it was the symbolic end of an era, but we didn't know what was going to replace it.

-George Bush knew the geopolitics well enough to know, "Now comes the hard part."

-The Malta summit is historic, and it's going to be historic even before it happens.

It's the first time that George Bush and Mikhail Gorbachev are going to meet face-to-face since Bush became President to discuss the problems of the world.

But the timing gets screwed up.

By the time they show up, the Berlin Wall is down.

Bush and Gorbachev, therefore, meet at Malta during a moment, which is really hard to appreciate just how tumultuous the world seemed, just how uncertain the world seemed.

-Baker suggests to him, "Look, I think we need a strong agenda.

We need to be proactive.

We need to sort of set the tone of this."

-And Bush came in and went through everything that Gorbachev might have hoped to hear.

-He said, "Mikhail, I think differently about our relationship.

And I'm going to give you 17 initiatives which demonstrate that I'm trying to put our path on a different route than it's been in all of the decades."

-Gorbachev drew the important conclusion that Bush was supportive of his efforts and wanted to try to help him succeed with the reforms.

-On the last few hours of the summit, all of us reporters were taken onto the cruise ship and we had a news conference with the two leaders together.

But at the very last question, President Bush called on me.

-No rebuttal, no backup question.

Last one.

-Here, the Berlin Wall had fallen down.

Gorbachev was clearly reforming the Soviet Union.

What's your personal relationship now between...

I said, "How would you describe your relationship -- friends?"

And their answer was, "We are partners."

[ Applause ] -Thank you very much, Mr. President.

Obviously, I'm honored to be asked by the President to join his administration.

I look forward very much to working with him and especially also with Brent Scowcroft, who's an old friend of many years standing.

Jim Baker, who's an old friend of many years standing.

-Dick is a widely respected man of principle.

Served his country with distinction for many years.

-Like George Bush, Dick Cheney had had all these different jobs in Washington before he actually joined the cabinet.

Dick Cheney, I first knew him as a 37-year-old Deputy White House Chief of Staff.

Back after Watergate, he became Chief of Staff.

He went home to Wyoming.

He came back.

He ran for Congress.

He was a leader in the U.S. Congress when he agreed to give that up and become Defense Secretary.

[ Camera shutter clicks ] -Are you on your way back to Wyoming today?

-Tomorrow morning.

I'll spend Wednesday and Thursday.

A couple of friends on the Wind River Canyon... -Ooh.

-...catching monster trout, rainbows and browns.

-Nice.

So what's better tasting?

-We don't eat 'em.

We release 'em.

-Oh, okay.

Of course.

♪♪ -When I was selected by the President to be the Secretary, I had to decide who I wanted to have in that post as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs.

I decided I really wanted to go with Colin Powell.

-He wasn't in line to be Chairman of the Joint Chiefs.

There were many other officers who had more experience, who were higher up on the food chain, if you will.

Powell had made his way through the Pentagon and made his way up the chain of command starting in Vietnam.

He was a person who had seen combat at a young age and had progressed everywhere.

-In the midst of the hustle and bustle of the Pentagon, the simple words of the Prophet Isaiah serve as a constant reminder of the pledge made by each of our young soldiers and sailors, airmen, Marines and Coast Guardsmen.

And the words read, "When the Lord God asked, 'Whom shall I send?

Who will go for us?'

And the reply came back.

'Here am I.

Send me.'"

[ Camera shutter clicking ] ♪♪ -Even though Cheney then was the Secretary of Defense and I was the Chairman, he was my boss.

He spoke for the Department of Defense, not me.

-The thing about Dick was that he would voice his views, but then he would always turn to Colin and give Colin the opportunity to voice his own views.

And there were times the two of them disagreed.

-That is confidence and that's a team.

♪♪ -We had our problems at times.

One of the first problems we had was in Panama with Noriega.

-Noriega, who is the head of Panama at this point, runs basically an organized crime and narcotics cartel.

-There is a failed attempt at a coup in Panama.

-By the time we could sort it out and talk about it and so forth, the coup went down.

Noriega was taken under under arrest, if you will.

He talked to the head coup plotters out of his pistol and killed him, so the coup didn't work.

-The United States under George Bush didn't back the coup against Noriega.

For many of Bush's critics, it seemed like a missed opportunity.

If we wanted Noriega removed, why didn't we support the people who wanted to remove him?

-We caught hell from members of Congress.

Some of my best friends up there were attacking us.

"You had an opportunity to take out Noriega and you didn't do it."

-The problem we had was with the complex policy structure and all the departments and agencies, we didn't have a very smooth system for consulting with one another.

The extent to which you could work together as a team in a timely fashion led us to develop something called the Deputies Committee.

Each principal has to designate somebody who works for him that's authorized to speak for him and participate in those kinds of decisions so that when you're scattered all over the world and everybody is doing everything, the Deputies Committee can come together, be able to move on something like a expected coup in Panama.

-Many attempts have been made to resolve this crisis through diplomacy and negotiations.

All were rejected by the dictator of Panama, General Manuel Noriega.

-And lo and behold, middle of December, Noriega gave us an opportunity.

His people killed an American service person and were abusing some of the wives who were in that situation.

-That was enough.

General Noriega's reckless threats and attacks upon Americans in Panama created an imminent danger.

-When he heard it all and realized an American soldier had been killed this time, he just said, "Do it."

-And we simply swamped the place.

-At about 8:50 this evening, General Noriega turned himself in to U.S. authorities in Panama with the full knowledge of the Panamanian government.

-We brought him to the United States, and he was convicted in court and went to jail.

That's the last we heard of him.

♪♪ ♪♪ [ Camera shutter clicking ] -Good job.

-Thank you.

-Thank you.

♪♪ -There are several million people in the national security structure, but at the end of the day, that funnels down into the Situation Room to a half a dozen to 10 people, and every problem in the world ends up on that table.

-You had to be agile and you had to really make certain that you were moving quickly.

The President was doing the hard work with Mrs. Thatcher or with Mitterrand.

The one thing he didn't have to worry about was back in Washington, that there was a lot of backbiting and infighting among his team.

Jim Baker was very certain to take members of the teams of his colleagues with him.

So I traveled with him all the time.

And the way that I met Steve Hadley was that we traveled with Secretary Baker.

-He would figure out a move that he wanted to make and he would call us all together and he would say, "Now, tomorrow when I meet with my Russian counterparts or Soviet counterparts, I want to do 'X.'

Now, you go call your principals.

And if anybody has a problem, let me know and I'll take it to the President, we'll get a decision."

So that Baker knew he had the whole government behind him, and if he made the play, he wasn't going to be second-guessed.

back in Washington, in the media.

-The best Presidents never seek consensus.

And I think one of the things that helped the Deputies Committee was that getting a consensus was never on my agenda.

My objective was to go to the President and say, "Here are the options.

Here's what your Secretary of State and your Secretary of Defense think.

Here's what your Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff thinks."

So that the President gets to make up his mind.

-From where I sat as director of Central Intelligence, it was my job to deliver important information that might not otherwise have been available to the President in decision making, in planning and forecasting.

George Bush was a fine listener.

He knew a great deal on his own, but he also knew that he didn't know it all.

And it was important to get as many facts before him so that he could make the final decision as to what to do.

-You know, these stories, who's up, who's down, who's winning, who's not, who's going to be a hard line, who's -- We've got a good, strong team coping with these problems.

Huh?

-The final -- -Helen, you already had three questions.

Get out of here.

[ Chuckles ] [ People chanting in foreign language ] -When the Wall fell, the situation had changed, and East Germany was in an extremely unstable position.

The notion of two Germanys, as they had been in Europe for 40 years, was no longer appropriate.

-It was Kohl who insisted that this was the opportunity to reunite Germany.

-For 40 years, we had talked about bringing freedom and democracy to the captive nations of Eastern Europe.

We now have a chance to do that.

-This is something that should be for them to determine.

But I think there is, in some quarters, a feeling, well, a reunified Germany would be -- would be detrimental to the peace of Europe, of Western Europe some way, and I don't accept that at all.

-France, Britain, Soviet Union, all dead set against a reunited Germany.

And after what happened earlier in the 20th century, they wanted no part of this.

-In a speech to students in Moscow, the Soviet leader made it clear that he is firmly opposed to the reunification of the two Germanys.

-Margaret Thatcher was very much opposed to German unification, and she told George Bush, told me, she says, "No, it's much better to have Germany divided.

You know, we've had two world wars where they've been united.

And this is a recipe for disaster in the future."

-We had to create the principles that everyone else would accept as how the policy should be formed and how it should be shaped and how it should be implemented.

-And the President had to make a decision.

Are we going to try to go fast or are we going to go in a more measured way?

Bush decided to go fast because he concluded that the longer it lasted, the more complex it would be.

And this was risky.

-His Excellency, Dr. Helmut Kohl, Chancellor of the Federal Republic of Germany.

-In February of 1990, at a crucial meeting at Camp David, we signed Kohl up to go fast.

And that was, again, extremely courageous on his part.

-We share a common belief that a unified Germany should remain a full member of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, including participation in its military structure.

-Some of my colleagues and I at the State Department came up with this idea of two plus four, and the numbers are quite significant because what we were doing was we're saying, "The Germans are in the lead."

-Two Germanys... -West Germany and East Germany... -Plus the four powers... -The four powers who fought and won World War II against Germany.

-That became the mechanism by which we negotiated the final settlement agreement.

-In helping Germany achieve freedom and unity, I believe all the states and peoples of Europe can be winners, and that should be our aim in these talks.

[ Patriotic music playing ] ♪♪ ♪♪ -Gorbachev comes to Washington during a period of great flux.

Gorbachev needs American aid.

He's actually hoping in particular for American and Western European financial aid.

The big issue on the table, though, is the fate of Germany.

That is to say, is Germany going to be a unified single nation?

And more importantly, will Germany actually be part of NATO?

Will Germany be neutral?

-When the summit meeting started, there had been no progress on the issue of German membership in NATO.

And the President tried different approaches and wasn't really getting anywhere.

I was about to send him a note saying, "Look, you know, it's hopeless.

Let's move on to other subjects."

When he happened to say, "Do you agree that the Helsinki Accords give every country the right to choose its own alliances?"

-To the shock of everybody in the room, Gorbachev says, yes, he agreed with this.

-And the room suddenly got very, very still.

-And so I wrote a note to the President.

"Mr. President, I think he just said that Germany can unify within NATO because it's its choice.

Ask him again."

-Give a note back to the President and he repeats it.

-And Gorbachev said, "Yes."

-This was an unbelievable scene.

-You could start to see the people on the Soviet side almost edging away because of -- There's generals, there's Shevardnadze -- because this is a huge, huge concession.

-Gorbachev basically had just overturned a half century of Soviet foreign policy.

-Gorbachev had taken a step from which there was no retreat.

That summit meeting and the discussion that took place was a turning point, really, in world history.

[ Bells tolling ] [ Camera shutter clicks ] -[ Speaking in German ] [ Patriotic music playing ] ♪♪ [ Cheers and applause ] ♪♪ -In the early morning hours of August 2nd, a powerful Iraqi army invaded its trusting and much weaker neighbor, Kuwait.

-Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait in August of 1990 never would have happened if the Cold War had still rained hot.

-Eduard Shevardnadze and I stood shoulder to shoulder and condemned Iraq's invasion of Kuwait.

Iraq was a Soviet client state.

That was incredibly significant.

And I remember standing there in that airport in Moscow and thinking to myself, "Boy, the Cold War is really over."

-The Arab leaders, for all their talk, were not showing any progress whatsoever on getting Saddam to back off.

The President flew back.

I was the one who had to meet the President and the President was visibly ticked.

-I am disappointed to find any comment by anyone that apologizes or appears to condone what's taken place.

-And that's when he made the fateful statement.

-This will not stand.

This will not stand -- this aggression against Kuwait.

I've got to go.

I have to go to work.

I've got to go to work.

-That's when people understood that if diplomacy or diplomacy plus sanctions didn't do the trick, that we were going to do whatever it takes.

-Iraq must learn that its disregard for international law will have crippling political and economic costs.

-One of the most amazing things about the Gulf War from the American perspective is that it wasn't just an American war and it wasn't just an American effort.

It was actually a broad international coalition.

-Baker would make all these trips and go to the capitals and see the leaders.

-Well, alliances are a significant part of America's strength.

They're a force multiplier for America.

-And we're getting strong support from around the world for what we've done.

I've been very, very pleased about that.

Large countries and small countries, the world reaction has been excellent.

-Once we got started, there were an awful lot of people on board.

The Syrians even sent troops.

-The British, the Canadians, the French.

-Arab forces, European forces.

I think there were like 40 or 45 different countries that contributed.

-We fought that war for about $70 billion.

And I think America paid about $10 billion of it.

-The United States organized not one coalition, but three coalitions -- political, economic, military.

All three of these kinds of coalitions being coordinated simultaneously.

And you get some sense of what team building can really look like on a global scale and how powerful that can be.

♪♪ -[ Chanting indistinctly ] [ Camera shutters clicking ] -Colin was very concerned initially that we give the sanctions a chance.

He was concerned enough that I arranged separately for him to go have a session with the President so he could tell the President what he believed.

The President did listen, and then shortly after that, continue with the course we were on, which was to deploy the force and use it if they don't get out.

-At my direction, elements of the 82nd Airborne Division, as well as key units of the United States Air Force, are arriving today to take up defensive positions in Saudi Arabia.

-Brent Scowcroft used to talk about the reluctant generals.

Brent had been a general himself in the Air Force.

He didn't mean to be critical.

What he was touching on, in part, was the -- the legacy, if you will, of Vietnam.

-Do you want to go to war?

I'm proud of being called a reluctant general, but I also have something else that's named after me.

It's called the Powell Doctrine.

And it says, "If you have to go to war, do it big.

Get it over with."

-Colin is often quoted as warning the President about huge casualties as though he were opposed to the war and was trying to warn the President off.

I never saw it that way.

I believe that Colin was doing exactly what the President's senior military adviser ought to be doing, and that was testing the President.

"If this thing goes south, are you still going to be with us?"

-Once the strategy has been decided upon and the decision has been made, we're no longer doing diplomacy, then you want the reluctant general to apply the Powell Doctrine.

♪♪ -It began, of course, with an extended air campaign, pummeling Iraqi forces on the ground.

-The targets being struck tonight are located throughout Iraq and Kuwait.

Our focus is on the destruction of Saddam Hussein's offensive military capabilities.

-We broke through.

Everything they put in front of us, we broke through.

-I think it's one of the most successful uses of military force by the United States ever.

-The Gulf War was the only war the United States has ever fought where we actually put on a piece of paper before the war what our war aims were going to be.

We debated three.

The first two, we decided, like, in 15 minutes.

That was to liberate Kuwait.

And the second was to destroy the Republican Guard.

The third we debated for two weeks.

And that was whether we should set as an objective regime change, getting rid of Saddam.

-People have argued for years after that, "Why didn't you go to Baghdad?"

-We consciously determined that we were not going to occupy Baghdad.

And furthermore, our military didn't want any part of occupying that great big Arab country.

Sure, we took a lot of heat, but that heat all dissipated.

We don't get those questions anymore.

-Mr. Speaker, the President of the United States!

[ Cheers and applause ] -I can report to the nation, aggression is defeated.

The war is over.

[ Cheers and applause ] ♪♪ I'm sure that many of you saw on the television the unforgettable scene of four terrified Iraqi soldiers surrendering.

They emerged from their bunker, broken tears streaming from their eyes, fearing the worst.

And then there was an American soldier.

Remember what he said?

He said, "It's okay.

You're all right now.

You're all right now."

That scene says a lot about America, a lot about who we are.

Americans are a caring people.

We are a good people, a generous people.

Let us always be caring and good and generous in all we do.

[ Cheers and applause ] -On one level, Desert Storm seemed like a huge success.

On another level, it left many things unsettled.

And very significantly, in my view, very significantly, it led to this now permanent U.S. military presence in a region where there had never before been a permanent U.S. military presence.

-We did not know exactly what would happen if we had taken Baghdad.

We learned 10 years later when we did take Baghdad.

It's still with us.

-If members of the Bush team are being honest, it's impossible for them to absolve themselves of responsibility for what happened next.

We ended up stuck in the Persian Gulf.

The United States military ended up making huge sacrifices.

I see this as a great warning that even the most seasoned statesmen are going to get things wrong.

And therefore, the right posture to take, I think, is one of wariness and caution.

-We have to pay more attention to what comes after.

-Attacks against Iraqi forces... -You know, we can cheer after a war and we can be happy that somebody has gone away.

But at the same time, you have to think deeper than that.

Then what happens?

Be ready to handle the aftermath.

♪♪ -I never had the sense that Gorbachev understood the full force of what he had unleashed.

-Gorbachev essentially wanted to reform communism from within.

He was a reformer, not a revolutionary.

He turned out to be a revolutionary, but I don't think that that was his intention.

-Gorbachev had no team.

He had Shevardnadze, but he shut out all of the rest of the Soviet government because he knew they were all dead set against what he wanted to do.

-Gorbachev, therefore, has basically a series of adversaries that he must confront over the course of his time in office, both those who think he's moving too far and those who think he's not moving fast enough.

-Gorbachev now, rather than having a plan, he was more now just trying to hold on.

-In some ways, he might have come to trust Jim Baker and George H.W.

Bush more.

They understood that Gorbachev's fragile hold on power was such that a coup was possible at any moment.

And that, of course, is exactly what happened.

-The coup against Gorbachev was a dramatic moment.

-Now, the situation concerning President Gorbachev's status is still unclear.

And I've twice tried to reach him by phone, including within the last hour, but have so far been unsuccessful.

-When the coup occurs against Gorbachev and it's not clear entirely who is in charge of the Soviet Union's 20,000 nuclear weapons, that's a dangerous moment.

-And what we don't want to do is do anything that legitimizes what is clearly an illegal coup.

-Now, the coup, when it did come, I have to say, was laughably inept.

And all of the people whom we feared in the Soviet Union turned out to be almost hapless.

-Eventually, nothing happened, and Gorbachev was released.

-That was really the last gasp of Gorbachev's power.

-Outgoing leader announced his anticipated resignation on national television.

He put it concisely, saying, "I cease my activities as president of the USSR."

-What really came as a surprise was in December when the Soviet Union imploded.

-George Bush will always be remembered for that moment in history, the end of the Cold War, where quite literally on Christmas night, he flew from Camp David to the White House to address the world.

-You and I have witnessed one of the greatest dramas of the 20th century -- the historic and revolutionary transformation of a totalitarian dictatorship -- the Soviet Union.

-The Soviet Union ceased to exist.

-This was a story I knew going into it that I was watching the world change before my eyes.

To see the Soviet Union literally be dissolved, all the countries under Moscow's thumb told, "You are now free and independent states."

I literally stood on the White House lawn on Christmas night and watched the entire map of the world changed.

-I like to make the point.

There is no precedent in history of a great empire collapsing without a major war.

And someday George H.W.

Bush will get the credit he deserves for having managed something that had never happened before in history.

-I spoke with Mikhail Gorbachev this morning.

We reviewed the many accomplishments of the past few years and spoke of hope for the future.

Mikhail Gorbachev's revolutionary policies transformed the Soviet Union.

-Mikhail Gorbachev is very revered still in the West.

That is not how he is seen in Russia today.

He is a very marginalized figure.

He is, if anything, reviled.

-And Russian history will not be kind to Gorbachev because he lost the Soviet Union.

It happened on his watch.

-The people who came to power in the aftermath of Mikhail Gorbachev were less interested in democratic ideals and they were interested in wielding power.

Vladimir Putin, in particular, thought that Russia had been offended, thought that Russia had been pushed away and rebuffed by the West.

Vladimir Putin, therefore, is fully on board with the rejection of perestroika.

He thinks the collapse of the Soviet Union was the greatest geopolitical calamity of the 20th century.

-[ Speaking Russian ] -Well, sure.

Of course, Putin is saying it.

-Putin could -- could blame anybody he wants.

He's a dictator.

He runs an authoritarian regime.

-The Soviets, Gorbachev himself, signed a treaty actually extending NATO's jurisdiction and boundary.

And even Gorbachev and Shevardnadze have said, "We were given everything we were promised by the Americans."

So let Putin say what he wants.

-And he had the highest ratings of any President in history after Desert Storm -- 90%, 91% approval rating.

But in the end, we lost on that reelection campaign.

-Thank you very much.

Hey, listen, you guys...

There is important work to be done to ensure the smooth transition of power.

So we will get behind this new President and wish him -- wish him well.

[ Cheers and applause ] You see, I remain absolutely convinced that we are a rising nation.

We have been in an extraordinarily difficult period, but do not be deterred, kept away from public service by the smoke and fire of a campaign year or the ugliness of politics.

-So 41, who I thought richly deserved a second term, didn't get it.

-...very much.

Thank you so much.

-After the wall fell and after the Soviet Union went away, we thought there was, as President Bush used to say, a new world order.

And with the expansion of NATO and the expansion of the European Union, I thought that the new world order was looking pretty good.

But somewhere along the way, the expectations of the peoples of Europe were not met.

-I think 30 years on, there's a lot to be pleased about in the last 30 years and a lot to be worried about.

Since the end of the Cold War and an understanding of what America was doing in containing the Soviet Union and so forth, I think it's gotten much tougher.

The problems have multiplied and they look different.

It's great to think about how statecraft worked in this period.

It was extraordinary.

But I would be the first to say, having gone back, I think the issues are different and the context not as clear.

[ Camera shutter clicks ] -I hope that people look back on the Bush 41 period with an eye towards maybe how we can draw some lessons about how we conduct business today and for the future.

-That team really made a difference.

What he wanted them to do had to be above politics but for the good of the world.

♪♪ ♪♪ -The funeral was extraordinary.

Everybody was there.

Leaders from around the world.

-For all of us who were part of his team at one point or another, it was a very, very sad moment and there was a lot of tears because he was such a great guy.

And the spirit of that funeral was just uplifting.

No bickering, no partisanship, no cheap shots, all just celebrating the wonderful life of George Herbert Walker Bush.

♪♪ -Secretary Baker was at the foot of the President's bed and toward the end, Jim Baker rubbed and stroked the President's feet.

For perhaps half an hour, the President smiled at the comfort of his dear friend.

Here I witnessed a world leader who was serving a servant who had been our world's leader.

-The German chancellor, Angela Merkel, was there, and I walked up to her and I said, "Chancellor, you honor us by being here."

She said, "I had to come for my country.

Without President Bush, we would never have unified."

And I thought it was the ultimate testament to the way that he had conducted this.

In fact, the Germans flew their flag at half staff when George H.W.

Bush died.

And it said to me, this was America at its best.

-At the end, we all knelt.

We all placed our hands on the President.

We said our prayers together and then we were silent for a full, long measure, as this man who changed all of our lives, who changed our nation, who changed our world left this life for the next.

It was a beautiful end.

It was a beautiful beginning.

♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪