The New York Times Book Review - Jacob Heilbrunn
Engel…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. Instead, Bush, together with Secretary of State James A. Baker III and National Security Adviser Brent Scowcroft, represented the last spasm of Republican internationalism, working closely with the Western allies and the Soviet leadership to end the Cold War peacefully.
From the Publisher
Shortlisted for the Council on Foreign Relations’ Arthur Ross Book Award "At one of the great turning points in modern history, America and the Free World (the phrase meant more then) were fortunate to be led by a president, George H.W. Bush, who is only now receiving his due. In this epic book, Jeffrey A. Engel explains how Bush presided over the momentous conclusion of the Cold War. With searching scholarship, a gift for the telling human detail, and an appreciation of how the personal and the political interact in often-subtle ways, Engel has written a landmark account of a president, a nation, and a global order at a crossroads. This is a terrific work of history." —Jon Meacham, author of Destiny and Power: The American Odyssey of George Herbert Walker Bush “Usually, when empires fall, war and chaos follow. Amazingly, when the Soviet Union--with its 20,000 or so nuclear weapons--collapsed, the world became (for a time, anyway) more peaceful and prosperous, thanks in no small part to the wisdom, vision, and restraint of President George H.W. Bush. Jeffrey Engel has written a rich, marvelous narrative history stocked with lessons for our own dangerous times." —Evan Thomas, author of Ike's Bluff and Being Nixon “The Cold War’s end offered peril and promise, and Jeffrey A. Engel’s revealing and deeply researched new history demonstrates that George H.W. Bush navigated it brilliantly. Instability loomed. Yet Bush’s personal diplomacy ensured Germany’s successful unification, the Soviet Union’s peaceful collapse, victory in the Persian Gulf, and preservation of Sino-American relations after the horror of Tiananmen Square. His reputation as a statesman has rightly grown over time. Peering into the halls of power on both sides of the Iron Curtain and in the Oval Office in particular, Engel’s gripping account show us why.” —Stephen Hadley, former National Security Advisor “Engel's excellent history forms a standing – if unspoken – rebuke to the retrograde nationalism espoused by Donald J. Trump.” –New York Times Book Review “When the World Seemed New is a fine, often stirring account of these times…an absorbing book.” –Wall Street Journal
From the Publisher - AUDIO COMMENTARY
"Jeffrey Engel has written a rich, marvelous narrative history stocked with lessons for our own dangerous times." —Evan Thomas, author of Ike's Bluff and Being Nixon
Library Journal
10/01/2017
Throughout his career—businessman, congressman, UN ambassador, CIA director, vice president under Ronald Reagan—George H.W. Bush (b. 1924) earned a reputation for being "reliable rather than revolutionary" and loyal to a fault, says Engel (director, Ctr. for Presidential History, Southern Methodist Univ.; Into the Desert). Engel maintains that Bush's impressive resume combined with a sturdy temperament made him uniquely qualified to manage the "most internationally complex" presidency since World War II. In his single term, the world watched the fall of the Berlin Wall; the dissolution of the Soviet Union; revolutions in China, Yugoslavia, and Romania; and American forces enter Panama, Somalia, and Kuwait. The author contends that Bush's style of "Hippocratic diplomacy," or striving to do no harm, led the way toward a new world order. Though settled within Bush's administration, the broader narrative is more focused on the geopolitical maneuvering of the era. It will intrigue fans of political history who are also interested in international relations. VERDICT General readers may struggle to get through the exhaustive political play-by-play, but Engel does justice to his subject and his monumental, if underrated, feats.—Chad Comello, Morton Grove P.L., IL
Kirkus Reviews
2017-09-04
Revisionist study of George H.W. Bush's term in the White House, which saw the collapse of the Soviet Union and the emergence of the U.S. as the world's sole superpower.According to Engel (Director, Center for Presidential History/Southern Methodist Univ.; Cold War at 30,000 Feet: The Anglo-American Fight for Aviation Supremacy, 2007, etc.), the first George Bush skillfully negotiated a course around numerous treacherous shoals. One involved Mikhail Gorbachev, whom other leaders regarded in friendlier terms than did Bush. Early in his term, Bush shook off advice from Margaret Thatcher and his predecessor, Ronald Reagan, and looked to "prepare in a serious way for a post-Gorbachev future," which in effect meant giving support to Gorbachev's competitor, Boris Yeltsin. Bush's attention to a collapsing Soviet Union at the end of the Cold War also meant careful negotiation with China, whose leadership, Engel argues, was terrified of the reforms sweeping other formerly communist regimes. The author praises Bush for his deft handling of numerous fraught situations, from the invasion of Panama to the much more extensive invasion of Kuwait. In this, however, he is not uncritical, and he notes that Bush was fortunate in facing modest resistance in the latter theater, even as he prepared for an extended conflict and significant casualties, writing in his diary, sanguinely, "sometimes in life you've got to do what you've got to do." Engel goes so far as to venture that Bush's views of Saddam Hussein "obscured his ability to tell fact from fiction when it came to the Iraqi leader." Even so, the author gives Bush credit for leaving office with a strong state and a global presence enhanced by the world's most dominant military, and he observes pointedly that the White House is not the best arena for the inexperienced; one thinks of the current president when reading Engel's caution that "the steeper the learning curve…the greater the danger." Useful reading for anyone with an interest in the first years of the post-Cold War era.
