Strobe Lite

...Talbott chose journalism and Philip Terzian writes a Washington column for The Providence Journal...

...Needless to say, none of this is mentioned in The Russia Hand, except for Clinton's friendly assurance that Republican hostility to Talbott was really an indirect assault upon Clinton himself...

...One senses, in their mutual recognition on ship-board, an eye for the main chance...

...Instead, they were encouraged to dream of a day in which their jihad would ultimately prevail and that come what may, the world would never permit them to experience ultimate defeat...

...Having achieved a vantage point few journalists could imagine, he arrived at his destination a decade or so too late...

...It is probably significant that Clinton, for all his reliance on Talbott's tactical skills, resisted the impulse to clasp him to his bosom...

...Alternate means of distribution sure can shake up an industry...

...The Israelis knew from the beginning that they would eventually be reined in by the United States and that they therefore would have to tailor their military strategy to fit into the time allotted them by the Americans.Thus, the ultimately crucial strategy was political: buy time, hoping the Arab armies could be routed...

...One must wonder what might have happened if the full magnitude of Arab folly had been recognized, if Israel's sovereignty over the conquered (not occupied) territories had been accepted, and if the Arabs had been told that they had invited disaster and deserved their thrashing...

...JULY/AUGUST 2002 • THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 75...

...Inyet another paradox that will baffle and frustrate the diplomatic "realists," ambiguity proved the greatest restraining force...

...Clinton had little in common with the austere, industrious, Hotchkiss-and-Yale-educated Talbott, and one guesses that Talbott was more amused than enchanted by the would-be congressman from Arkansas...

...Classical labels are downsizing right and left, simply because they aren't making money with the vast majority of their catalogue, because bricks-and-mortar retailers refuse to stock the genre's 60,000 titles and because, as Tommasini says, large labels no longer consider "recording classical music a cultural service, a prestige operation...

...But it must be said that, while U.S.-Russian relations were, and remain, significant, they did not have the supreme importance the Cold War had conferred...

...If this were anyone other than Bill Clinton, the reader might assume an intimate friendship...

...But the center of gravity in American foreign policy was moving elsewhere...

...Post-Soviet Russia was a chaotic environment, featuring rotten institutions, intractable problems, mercurial personalities and successive crises...

...When the Russian currency collapsed or the NATO bombs rained down on Belgrade, it was Talbott who was flown to Moscow to hold hands...

...Clinton's election to the White House is described as a kind of distant news event—something like the world figure-skatingchampionship—which barely distracts Time's diplomatic columnist from his appointed rounds...

...He is author of the weblog www..MoreThanZeroSum.com, where a version of this article first appeared...

...But the biggest lesson of all is the one that our own leaders should take to heart today...

...And, as Tommasini points out, we don't need a 6th or 7th recording of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony...

...The author is at pains to describe their meetings over the years, including Clinton's visits to his Georgetown home featuring late-night bull sessions, quantities of junk food and sleep on the couch in the Talbott living room...

...But he was also correct to discern that Boris Yeltsin, for all his manifold flaws and quirks, was the best among innumerable undesirable choices in Moscow...

...Talbott was well-versed in Russian history and culture, and in the course of his Time career got to know any number of pertinent Russians...

...Then they will look for the "safest" series next year...

...This is a now-forgotten episode in the long and sorry annals of congressional advice and consent.When Clinton's first deputy secretary, Clifton Wharton, was fired after one year in office, innumerable senators were surprised and appalled that Clinton should have appointed a mere journalist to the number-two post in the Department of State, a sinecure traditionally reserved for eminent persons...

...Strobe Lite CLINTON'S MAN FOR MOSCOW The Russia Hand: A Memoir of Presidential Diplomacy STROBE TALBOTT Random House/478 pages/$29.95 REVIEWED BY By Philip Terzian I t used to be said of Andrei Gromyko, the stone-faced (and seemingly eternal) Soviet foreign minister: What a memoir he could write.Well, after Mikhail Gorbachev kicked him upstairs in the 1980s, Gromyko did write his memoirs—and they were achingly dull...

...he Neu, York Times' redoubtable music critic Anthony Tommasini devoted a column last fall ("Classical Recording: Spinning Into Oblivion...

...But on Clinton's part, at least, the pattern was clear:Talbott was a brick on the path to ambition...

...We learn a great deal about shuttle diplomacy, bureaucratic chains of command, telephone negotiations over the removal of missiles from Ukraine, the civil war in Kosovo, the status of the Russian Orthodox Church, NATO expansion and the fight for Pristina's airport...

...I mention this because, in spite of Talbott's status as a senior Clinton acquaintance, there is a curious, indefinable distance between the two...

...To this must be added some particular disappointments...

...And the Israelis gained a lot of time, far more than they had expected, not through their own diplomacy, or even from American largesse, but rather from an enormous blunder by the Arabs (and a blunder they are repeating as I write...

...Be that as it may, Talbott was the first deputy secretary of state in the nation's history to address himself to a single issue: relations between the United States and the former Soviet Union.This was, on the face of it, a happy coincidence...

...We have to remember this is not how classical music originally gained popularity...

...Of course, there may be reasons for this...

...to the sad state of the classical recording industry...

...The task of the United States in Talbot's tenure was not to challenge Russian power, but to manage Russian stability and concoct a working relationship...

...Perhaps the enemies of America and Israel would have learned a lesson, rejected the fanatics in their midst, and, left to their own devices, come to terms with reality...

...It happened to Stravinsky...

...President Johnson, Secretaries Rusk and McNamara and the other key decision-makers in Washington were so alarmed at these accusations (remember, all this was taking place against the background of the Vietnam war, with Johnson desperate to convince the world that he was a peacemaker, not a warmonger) that they devoted enormous energy to proving that the United States was not involved...

...Both sides moved tentatively so long as they were unsure of the positions of the great powers...

...The author politely praises the president's knowledge and intuition, but it is clear from The Russia Hand that Clinton's grasp of policy—so far as Talbott was aware of things—was facile, intermittent and overly reliant on human relations...

...This leaves Talbott, in the end, with not much to say...

...Today, if a young composer with the right sponsorship flung cow dung into the audience while blowing a kazoo in his pants, the audience would clap politely and roll their eyes over dinner at the Russian Tea Room afterward...

...He was not a closet reformer, but a functionary who had served, and thrived, since Stalin's day...

...And that is because Israel's victory was not recognized by the world community, which set about undoing it even before the cease-fire was in place...

...Chamber music literally was played in one's living room, and amateur musicians were a big part of the art form...

...It was Holbrooke, however, who had the President's ear, and carried the more 74 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR • JULY/AUGUST 2002 M U S 1 C By "Mindles H. Dreck" Classical Economics w important messages to and fro...

...In fact, Talbott had been applying the same energy and enthusiasm to undermining the foreign policies of the Reagan and Bush administrations that he had to advancing his own career in Soviet studies.Talbott is truthful when he says that he did not address himself specifically to the campaign while Clinton was running for president, but it is a Clintonian kind of truthfulness...

...No wonder the artists sometimes have trouble getting inspired for a performance...

...By relentlessly deriding George H.W...

...In the old days, if they didn't like something, they booed it off stage...

...The Israelis knew then, and know now, that such advice is an invitation to national suicide.Yet the Europeans continue to invite it and indeed condemn every Israeli response, while showing sympathy for her attackers...

...All of it was rejected by the Arabs, sealing their doom...

...Dry, strictly chronological and strikingly devoid of style, introspection, insight or candor, The Russia Hand tells us little that we don't already know, and less than we might have had a right to expect...

...Our fellow concert-goers noisily unwrap cough drops and contract 30-second cases of tuberculosis between movements.We are all jammed too close together...

...The burden of silence weighs heavily on everyone...

...They are not an involved or youthful market...

...As Oren notes in a bittersweet final remark, the Six-Day War never really ended, either for the politicians or for the military or even for the historians...

...Classical music's demise is the fault of the listeners, the artists and the concert venues...

...and for Talbott, in due course, Clinton served a comparable purpose...

...It now lies to us to write the final chapter of the Six-Day War...

...A product of the finest education the United States has to offer, a lifelong journalist and citizen of a free society, after eight years as Bill Clinton's principal adviser on the former Soviet Union, he has produced a memoir that might have been drafted by Gromyko's ghostwriter...

...Classical's share of the CD market has dropped from 7 percent in the late 1980s (when consumers were replacing their classical LP library) to about 3 percent currently...

...Well, yes...

...Poor Talbott...

...And it surely angered him to watch Richard Holbrooke emerge as the favored diplomatic trouble-shooter...

...It is only after his old friend from Oxford is elected president, and the good news is sinking in at the Talbott breakfast table, that the author thinks to mention to the reader that his wife had been a senior Clinton campaign aide...

...For that matter, Clinton himself was a cloud on Talbott's horizon...

...To be sure, poor old Gromyko put pen to paper when the Soviet Union was still a going concern...

...Talbott first met Clinton during the famous ocean voyage in 1968 that trans-ported the future president, and assorted future Friends of Bill, to Oxford and their Rhodes scholarships...

...to a concert and look around you...

...It must be acknowledged that Talbott's icy personality and ill-disguised contempt for Republicans had something to do with their attitude, but the point was nottrivial, and a minor impasse ensued.This was broken, finally, when the White House pledged to confine Talbott to his specialty, the former Soviet Union, and honor Minority Leader Robert Dole's demand: "No more promotions for Strobe Talbott...

...At roughly 40 years old, we are bringing the average age down substantially...

...But Talbott is both disingenuous and uninformative...

...In this, of course, someone with special knowledge and a passion for detail was advantageous, and Talbott thrived...

...Only the big names and recognized "warhorse" pro-grams sell out...

...Many of my friends who also love classical music find this a tragedy.Tommasini ends his article with a seeming shake of his head and a suggestion that "the Internet is here to stay...

...Unlike their own wars, in which the victors were granted their fill of the spoils, the Europeans, Russians and Americans embarked on an endless political campaign to claw back land and glory for the defeated Arabs...

...He spoke very clearly to Israel: "If Israel is attacked, we will not permit her to be destroyed...

...And as diplomatic micromanagers from Henry Kissinger to Dennis Ross read this book, they will surely observe that every American call for Israeli or Arab restraint over some specific detail—the walls of the Old City of Jerusalem, a particular village or historic site—bogged down in nitpicking and prolonged bar-gaining, while the greater war raged on...

...Both succeeded...

...If we want classical recordings to survive, we may just have to embrace it...

...His training at Time serves him well in minor vignettes—"Larry [Summers'] brain was like a tank powered by a Lotus engine: It purred as it rolled over any-thing in its way"—or petty disdain: "I had interviewed [Richard] Nixon a number of times in the '80s, so I knew what to expect: an encounter that was awkward bordering on weird...

...The problem, from Talbott's point of view, is that Clinton seems to have arrived at this conclusion with no discernible assistance from the Russia Hand: The president, for reasons we cannot discern, felt affectionate toward "ol' Boris," and it was Talbott's job to grease the machinery of the partnership...

...Strobe Talbott, by contrast, has no such excuse...

...As Ehud Barak and Bill Clinton read this book, they will surely notice that when Israeli Foreign Minister Abba Eban spoke at the United Nations on the war's second day, he called on the Arab nations to join with Israel to look beyond the fighting and shape a new Middle East, in which peace would enrich everyone and new generations could be safe from the clouds of war...

...It is the Cadillac of the music business, in the sense that it refuses to evolve from catering to an aging but wealthy demographic, for whom the music is often secondary...

...And when Washington proposed a cease-fire after the first day's fighting, it was summarily rejected by Syria, Iraq and Egypt, even though the Arab rout was on, the Egyptian air force had been totally destroyed and the Syrians were in such a shambles that the Arab "street" echoed with the bitter witticism that Syria was prepared to fight to the death of the last Egyptian...

...But Clinton, no doubt, saw in Talbott a useful connection, and Talbott probably glimpsed a future congressional source...

...When, in 1992, Clinton was elected president, Talbott was rewarded with a senior post at the State Department...

...The Arabs claimed from the outset that they were under attack by both Israel and America, that American troops were marching on them, that American (and even British) ships were firing at them and that American planes were bombing...

...And no wonder, as Tommasini "Mind/es H.Dreck," a pseudonym, is a managing director of a New York money management firm...

...If we did, there are 100 or so to choose from...

...Characteristically,Talbott was determined to master the then-popular science of Kremlinology—he wrote a thesis on the poet Vladimir Mayakovsky, and later translated Nikita Khrushchev's memoirs—while Clinton intended to have a good time...

...Clinton was scarcely the first president to personalize foreign policy...

...JULY/AUGUST 2002 • THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 73 Time ma;7izine instead of an academic career, and Clinton applied his nimble mind and glad-handing manner to politics...

...As a marketplace, too many of us are asleep...

...Bush in the pages of Time, Talbott proved an invaluable asset to Clinton...

...We make Wimbledon spectators look like soccer hooligans...

...On another occasion, when Talbott was elevated from under secretary to deputy secretary of state, the author alludes to congressional unhappiness with his promotion...

...A large portion of the audience is in it for social prestige, not music...

...The current European appeasement of Arab imperialism was clearly prefigured in the position of France's Charles de Gaulle...

...It must have frustrated him to serve as the loyal deputy to the bloodless Warren Christopher and the bumptious Madeleine Albright...

...both became more aggressive when they were pressured to abandon some limited objective...

...if Israel attacks first, we will condemn you...

...But it is not the sweep of history we witness so much as the vacuum cleaning...

...Go (please...

...Memoirs are, by definition, briefs for the defense, and their authors are expected to put their best feet forward...

...It clearly galled Talbott to find himself arguing the merits of diplomatic strategy with the likes of George Stephanopoulos...

...It was not, as now, just a rarified prop for the elite, a place to see the best of the best, be seen and to have your credentials taken...

...If Israel's victory in 1967 had been recognized, we might have avoided the necessity of delivering their ultimate defeat in our own war against the masters of terror and the visionaries of the resurgence of Islam...

...My wife and I subscribe to several series at Carnegie Hall and other venues...

...It might also shake that industry back to life...