At the Highest Levels: The Inside Story of the End of the Cold War

Michael Beschloss · Strobe Talbott

Aug. 2016 · Open Road Media

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The landmark story of Bush-Gorbachev diplomacy: “No one has ever given as complete and compelling an account of the higher reaches of foreign policy” (Time).

December 1989. The Berlin Wall had fallen. Millions across the Eastern Bloc were enjoying new freedoms. And the USSR was falling apart. But the peaceful end of the Cold War was far from assured, requiring the leaders of rival superpowers to look beyond the animosities of the past and embrace an uncertain future.
 
At the Highest Levels is the fascinating story of that unlikely partnership, a real-time exposé of the negotiations between US President George H. W. Bush and Soviet Premier Mikhail Gorbachev. Granted extraordinary access to private conversations and closed-door meetings at the Kremlin, White House, Pentagon, CIA, and KGB, Michael Beschloss and Strobe Talbott reveal the high-stakes international diplomacy that ended the nuclear arms race and decades of proxy wars.
 
The result is “an accurate first draft of the Cold War’s last days,” wrote David Remnick in the New Yorker, “filled with gaudy historical riches.” Each an acclaimed author in his own right, Beschloss and Talbott together deliver journalism at its best: an “intimate and utterly absorbing” record of this critical meeting of minds (The New York Times).
 

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Michael Beschloss is a historian and the New York Times–bestselling author of nine books, including Kennedy and Roosevelt: The Uneasy Alliance (1980); Mayday: Eisenhower, Khrushchev, and the U-2 Affair (1986); The Crisis Years: Kennedy and Khrushchev, 1960–1963 (1991); The Conquerors: Roosevelt, Truman, and the Destruction of Hitler’s Germany (2002); and Presidential Courage: Brave Leaders and How They Changed America, 1789–1989 (2007). Born in Chicago and educated at Williams College and Harvard University, Beschloss is a contributor to NBC News, PBS NewsHour, and the New York Times, and has been called “the nation’s leading presidential historian” by Newsweek. He lives with his wife in Washington, DC.
 
Strobe Talbott is the president of the Brookings Institution and the author of twelve books, including Deadly Gambits:The Reagan Administration and the Stalemate in Nuclear Arms Control (1984); At the Highest Levels: The Inside Story of the End of the Cold War (1993), written with Michael Beschloss; The Russia Hand: A Memoir of Presidential Diplomacy (2002); and The Great Experiment: The Story of Ancient Empires, Modern States, and the Quest for a Global Nation (2008). A former Time columnist and Washington bureau chief, Talbott served as deputy secretary of state for seven years and was the architect of the Clinton administration’s policy toward Russia and the other states of the former Soviet Union. He translated and edited two volumes of Nikita Khrushchev’s memoirs in the early 1970s and founded the Yale Center for the Study of Globalization in 2001. Talbott currently lives in Washington, DC.