By Randal Wallace
Randal Wallace Presents : "George H. W. Bush" a four season look back at his extraordinary life, career, and his single term as President of the United States. A term that saw the high point of Ame
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In this episode we see the beginning of the end of the Coup as three people are killed by tanks running over them as the Army is moving in Moscow toward the White House, their home of the Russian Parliament. It is a day full of drama as Boris Yeltsin fights back defiantly. He eludes the Coup leaders by 40 minutes at his house and heads down to the parliament building. Then he moves to block the coup.
He calls on a strike by the nations minors, calls the coup leaders directly, and warns them that the world is watching and their would be consequences for their actions, and he talks with the leaders of the free world , John Major of the United Kingdom, and George H. W, Bush. the President of the United States, and he impresses then both. He is singularly the brave figure who stands up against the tyranny of the Committee of Eight.
Boris Yeltsin emerges on this day as the most powerful public figure in Russia.
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On August 19, 1991, George H. W. Bush was woken up just after midnight to be told that Mikhail Gorbachev had resigned suddenly for health reasons as the President of the Soviet Union. That did not sound right to anyone.
What unfolded for the next three days was the entire world watching the unraveling of one of the two Super Powers of the past half century. Gorbachev was placed under house arrest in his Black Sea Dacha, and his vice President and the leaders of the KGB and the Army took over the country.
However, the coup was poorly conceived, poorly managed, and the plotters were often unwilling to to the things necessary to secure control of the country. They also miscalculated how much the reforms that Gorbachev had set forward in the Soviet Union had actually taken hold. The people were resisting the take over and a leader emerged who stood up against it all.
His name was Boris Yeltsin. This is the story of those three days in the next three episodes. It was a historic three days that changed the World.
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In this episode we look back at several important situations developing all at once. The Soviet Union is in trouble. Economically the situation is getting dire as Gorbachev comes to the economic summit to ask for help. As the G-7 includes the Soviets for the very first time.
This is just after a fairly small, and not so celebratory May Day in the Soviet Union. It used to be the event every year where the Soviets displayed their military muscle and its high brass stood up over seeing it all from the balcony. Missiles and troops would march by under portraits of Lenin, and whomever the Communist Party Leader was at the time, be it Khrushchev or Brezhnev. But this time it was sparsely attended under heavy security, and it had none of the trappings of old.
If that was not bad enough for the Communist superpower, its largest Republic, the Russian Federation, was in the midst of holding its very first election for President, in what would be its first completely free election with real choices for leadership. the front runner was not the Kremlin's choice, it was a renegade natural politician who had already bolted the Communist Party and was busy trying to get control of various power sources from the Soviet leadership and put it under Russian control His name was Boris Yeltsin and he was on the verge of being catapulted onto the World Stage.
Finally the START 1 Treaty was being negotiated and it would be a further thawing of the Cold War but one that had the hardline Communists worried that their control was rapidly fading away. The Treaty was defined here by a use of Artificial Intelligence (our first use of that) here:
START I, or the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty I, was an agreement between the United States and the Soviet Union to reduce the number of long-range nuclear weapons. The treaty was signed in Moscow on July 31, 1991 by George H.W. Bush and Mikhail Gorbachev.
The treaty's main limits included: 1,600 strategic nuclear delivery vehicles, 6,000 accountable warheads, 4,900 ballistic missile warheads, 1,540 warheads on 154 heavy ICBMs, and 1,100 warheads on mobile ICBMs.
The treaty also required the parties to:
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Coalition Building in the Gulf War
President Bush introduces former Secretary of State James Baker. Mr. Baker then spoke about diplomatic efforts to build an international coalition to fight Iraq and liberate Kuwait. Following his remarks he answered questions from the audience.
We decided that this event was too important not to feature in its entirety. It was held on October 26, 2001
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In this episode we follow President Bush during the period just after the Gulf War has ended. In this period he makes several speeches thanking the State Department, the soldiers, speaking to the future soldiers at the West Point Graduation and trying to inspire their future service to the nation.
Finally, he addresses the service remembering those who fell during the Gulf War at the amphitheater at Arlington National Cemetery. It is there on our nation's most hallowed ground that this President comes back to honor those we lost on his watch during the Gulf War.
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On March 6, 1991, President George H. W. Bush addressed a joint session of Congress to report back that the war in the Gulf was over. That Iraq had been repulsed and Kuwait had been restored. It was an impressive moment for a President who had once been called a wimp on the front page of Newsweek.
This military operation had not only been a success it was arguably the United States most successful military endeavor. It was run as near perfectly as a war could be run. President Bush and his team set clear objectives, and backed them up with overwhelming force, and when the mission was complete they left without getting bogged down in a nation building exercise in the Middle East.
It was a clear sign of the lessons learned by a generation of Americans who had mastered their moment, from a Great Depression, to the Cold War, to this final triumph in the Middle East.
However, it would not be their final triumph as the Cold War had a couple of more twists and turns to make before it would end in 1991 as well.
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In this episode we look back at the end of the war and then tune in to a speech by the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff to the Veterans of Foreign Wars.
General Colin Powell emerged from this war a national hero. He would go on to look seriously at his own run for President in 1996. After you listen in on this speech you understand why he was seen as so formidable a candidate. Powell is a very good public speaker.
Here he talks about the war, the past wars, and the soldiers who have fought them. It is a good speech.
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In this episode we take a look back at General Norman Schwarzkopf the man as remembered by one of his colleagues. Then we tune in to the press conference known in Gulf War lore as "The Mother of all Press Conferences"
In this press Conference Schwarzkopf goes through what had been happening on the ground and offers his own assessment of the Leadership skills of Saddam Hussein. He is , as always, blunt, direct, and to the point. He also shows flashes of his sense of humor as the war begins to wind down with a commanding American victory in the Middle East.
Then we tune in to the ceremony honoring both General Schwarzkopf and his Commanding officer Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Colin Powell.
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We had planned to do a series of Press Conference shows as we told the story of the Gulf War. These are those shows. They are, as we earlier explained on our Housekeeping episode, out of chronological order.
This Press Cnference is from Janaury 27, 1992 and it was held on the same day as the Super Bowl, In this briefing Gernaral Shwartzkoft will go over the situation in the Gulf. The biggest issue at this time was the dumping of Kuwaiti Oil into the Gulf waters.
You will Schwarzkopf go over the situation as best he understands it from the environmental impact side but he is clear that it won't effect his military ability to make war on Saddam Hussein.
It is vintage General Stormin Norman Schwarzkopf.
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In this special edition of The Richard Nixon Experience, we let you tune back in to that final day at the White House for President Nixon. You will hear excerpts from his resignation speech, his speech to his staff and reminiscences from several different people about those events including President Nixon and President Ford.
All of this leading up to an extraordinary 3 minutes of footage just released by the Richard Nixon foundation that includes President nixon's brief impromptu remarks at the El Torro Marine Base when he arrived back home in California. Until this year that footage had not been released. So, other than the network news casts we had not been able to hear any of the audio from that extraordinary moment when a President, leaving office in disgrace, was greeted like a hero by the people he had led. Not at all the story you have been told.
Then we have invited a guest to speak on this episode. Robert M. Bostock, was an aid to President Nixon in retirement and he has been a great friend to podcast. He recently wrote an op-ed for the Washington Times and in it he asked a question that I hope many of you will ask. What if President Nixon had been allowed to finish his second term?
It is a question worth listening to the answer too and we asked Mr. Bostock to read his op-ed for our show and we will let you listen to it at the end of this broadcast.
I agree with Mr. Bostock, the world would have been a much different and much better place had Richard Nixon completed his term of office.
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The podcast currently has 459 episodes available.