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A Memoir of Presidential Diplomacy
Random House
May 2003
On Sale: May 13, 2003
512 pages
ISBN: 0812968468
EAN: 9780812968460
Paperback (reprint)
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Non-Fiction Biography
During the past ten years, few issues have mattered more to
America’s vital interests or to the shape of the
twenty-first century than Russia’s fate. To cheer the fall
of a bankrupt totalitarian regime is one thing; to build on
its ruins a stable democratic state is quite another. The
challenge of helping to steer post-Soviet Russia-with its
thousands of nuclear weapons and seething ethnic
tensions-between the Scylla of a communist restoration and
the Charybdis of anarchy fell to the former governor of a
poor, landlocked Southern state who had won national
election by focusing on domestic issues. No one could have
predicted that by the end of Bill Clinton’s second term he
would meet with his Kremlin counterparts more often than had
all of his predecessors from Harry Truman to George Bush
combined, or that his presidency and his legacy would be so
determined by his need to be his own Russia hand. With Bill Clinton at every step was Strobe Talbott, the
deputy secretary of state whose expertise was the former
Soviet Union. Talbott was Clinton’s old friend, one of his
most trusted advisers, a frequent envoy on the most
sensitive of diplomatic missions and, as this book shows, a
sharp-eyed observer. The Russia Hand is without question
among the most candid, intimate and illuminating
foreign-policy memoirs ever written in the long history of
such books. It offers unparalleled insight into the inner
workings of policymaking and diplomacy alike. With the scope
of nearly a decade, it reveals the hidden play of
personalities and the closed-door meetings that shaped the
most crucial events of our time, from NATO expansion,
missile defense and the Balkan wars to coping with Russia’s
near-meltdown in the wake of the Asian financial crisis. The
book is dominated by two gifted, charismatic and flawed men,
Bill Clinton and Boris Yeltsin, who quickly formed one of
the most intense and consequential bonds in the annals of
statecraft. It also sheds new light on Vladimir Putin, as
well as the altered landscape after September 11, 2001. The Russia Hand is the first great memoir about war and
peace in the post-cold war world.
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