The suitcase was large; its weighty contents a mystery. A young Strobe Talbott, who had lugged the thing up to his friend Steven Weisman’s apartment on New York’s Upper West Side, was clearly nervous leaving it behind while they went to dinner.
“He kept asking, ‘Is my suitcase going to be safe in your apartment?’ I said, ‘What’s in the suitcase?’ and he said, ‘I can’t say,’ ” recalled Weisman, who had befriended Talbott at Yale in the ’60s when both were absorbed in reading poetry and writing for the student newspaper.
“I joked, ‘What is it — My Years at the Kremlin?’ and he kind of blanched,” said Weisman, now a veteran New York Times reporter. “He said, ‘Someday we’re going to look back on this conversation and laugh.’ ”
As Weisman and the world soon learned, the suitcase held the memoirs of Nikita Khrushchev. Talbott, then a Rhodes scholar at Oxford, was translating them from Russian to English. The 1970 publication of “Khrushchev Remembers” helped launch Talbott’s two-decade career at Time magazine, but also got him declared persona non grata in the USSR, preventing him from traveling there for five years and ensuring a KGB agent following on visits thereafter.
Talbott, now president of the Brookings Institution, the oldest and largest Washington think tank, said his fascination with all things Russian began when he was growing up in Ohio during the Cold War. “We lived in the shadow of destruction. I can remember the Cuban Missile Crisis as vividly as if it were yesterday,” he said. “I was intrigued by this country that was the great ‘Other’ and this character Nikita Khrushchev, and I developed an interest in nuclear weapons.” But it was a 10th-grade teacher at the prestigious Hotchkiss School in Connecticut who introduced Talbott to the Russian novel. He fell in love with the material and longed to read it in its original language.
After earning degrees in Russian studies from Yale and Oxford, Talbott headed to Time, where he became a prolific author and respected foreign affairs expert. He left journalism for government when longtime friend, former housemate and Rhodes classmate Bill Clinton came calling. He served first as ambassador at large and special adviser on the emerging independent states of the former Soviet Union, then as deputy secretary of state under Madeleine Albright.
Since taking the helm of Brookings in 2002, Talbott has doubled the think tank’sannual budget to $80 million and is credited with cementing its reputation as a source of independent, nonpartisan research and policy advice. He also has expanded its reach to become a national — and an international — organization.
His latest book, “The Great Experiment,” touts his vision of “global governance,” the concept that independent states working together can form a global order capable of tackling common problems. And Talbott, a vocal critic of President Bush’s unilateralist foreign policy, expects Brookings’ scholars to play a significant role in shaping America’s next move on the world stage, whether the next president is Republican or Democrat.
“There are a lot of problems facing the world and therefore the most powerful nation in the world, and I think different people equally smart and literate would come up with different lists,” Talbott said. For him, the top two priorities are averting nuclear war on multiple fronts and thwarting global climate change. If not addressed within the next 10 years, he said, “they have the potential to do unprecedented damage, and perhaps even terminal damage, to our ability to sustain at least civilization, and perhaps life itself — certainly human life.”
The good news, according to Talbott, is that the top presidential contenders — Sens. Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and John McCain — are all moderate pragmatists with the demonstrated ability to reach across party lines and “to act boldly.” The next president, he said, must move quickly to “reinstate the United States in the good graces of the world as a country that is prepared not just to build a rule-based world order, but to obey those rules itself.” “In short,” he said, “we have to set a good example.”
Brookings will be ready, he said, to offer the next president the best of its ideas. Among his are closing the U.S. detention center at Guantanamo and confirming that the United States will abide by the Geneva Conventions barring torture. Also urgent, he said, is the need for the U.S. Senate to ratify the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty to reassure the rest of the world that the United States does not intend to test new nuclear weapons.
Once the United States regains its moral footing and the trust of other nations, it must engage globally to reduce and eventually eliminate nuclear weapons, as well as cut greenhouse gas emissions and invest in clean, renewable energy to ward off global warming, Talbott said. He also recommends rebuilding the nation’s mass transit infrastructure, catching up with Europe, Japan and China in the use of rail, and promoting the use of nuclear power while at the same time increasing control over nuclear technology so it doesn’t fall into terrorists’ hands.
“Strobe is constantly thinking, engaging in how the world works and what are the important issues we need to address so that we might actually see a better world,” said Carlos Pascual, a former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine who directs Brookings’ foreign policy studies. “That is what drives him and excites him. It is how he spends his time, how he works and how he relaxes.”
Pascual, as well as other colleagues and friends, describe dinner parties at the Woodley Park home of Talbott and his wife, Brooke Shearer, as evenings filled with a free-flowing exchange of ideas among smart people.
“It’s the most interesting dinner table in town,” said Walter Isaacson, who worked with Talbott at Time and is now president and chief executive officer of the Aspen Institute. Isaacson called Talbott “the most dedicated friend” and “a curatorof serious ideas who understands the great trends of this world.”
Pascual and other colleagues said Talbott also is gracious and takes an interest in their personal lives and families. “He asks, ‘Are you happy?’ and he genuinely wants to know,” Pascual said. He also stays in touch via e-mail with colleagues and friends around the world, but because he rises at 4 or 5 a.m. each day, he often turns in long before most Washington schmooze fests really get going. “I’ve been at dinner parties where he gets up from the table and says, ‘I’m going to bed,’” Pascual said.
Talbott said he loves books, music, movies and scuba diving, and is an avid bicyclist who rides Washington’s Capital Crescent Trail at least once, often twice, per weekend.
Weisman, whose friendship with Talbott spans four decades, described him as “profoundly serious” and “totally, totally devoted” to his wife and two grown sons, not to mention their two dogs.
“When you go over there, they are jumping all over you and over the furniture,” he said. “Their previous dog was such a constant companion, if you invited Strobe and Brooke over for a party or dinner, the dog came too. It was just understood. We had them to a New Year’s Eve party and we had to banish our own dog to the basement to make room for theirs.” Some might be annoyed at that, Weisman said, but “one always accommodates Strobe.”
“There’s something about Strobe, so accomplished at everything and yet disorganized — though he gets everything done. There’s a little bit of the absent-minded professor about him,” Weisman said. “He’s appealing because he’s not arrogant. There’s just a sweetness about him. Strobe is sweet.”
STROBE TALBOTT’S TIPS FOR SUCCESS
1 Work hard.
2 Have fun.
3 Be lucky.
4 See the world.
5 Limit yourself to one extra-hot venti caramel macchiato a day.
BIO FILE | STROBE TALBOTT
» Born: April 25, 1946
» Hometown: Dayton, Ohio
» Education: Hotchkiss; Yale, B.A. in Russian studies in 1968, M.A. in 1976; Oxford 1971
» Family: Wife Brooke Shearer; two sons
» Key jobs: Time magazine, 1971-92; U.S. State Department, 1993-2001 (ambassador at large and special adviser to the secretary of state for the new independent states of the former Soviet Union; deputy secretary of state); founding director, Yale Center for the Study of Globalization; president, Brookings Institution, 2002-present
» Biggest influences: My wife and my father
» Favorite book: “Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy” by John Le Carre
» Quote to live by: “Everyone is entitled to his own opinions, but not his own facts.” – Daniel Moynihan
