Strobe Talbott, president of the Brookings Institution, worked for many years as a columnist for Time, was founding director of the Yale Center for the Study of Globalization, and served from 1994 to 2001 as deputy secretary of state. His new book is “The Great Experiment: The Story of Ancient Empires, Modern States, and the Quest for a Global Nation” (Simon & Schuster, 2008). He lives in Washington.
QThe Great Experiment covers a lot of detailed history in a limited space.
AIt was actually kind of a terrifying prospect when I started it, and it ended up — if you can ever confess this — a lot of fun. It was like going back to college in the best sense …
QHow difficult was it to make the change from journalism to diplomacy?
AIt’s kind of unusual for a working journalist to go straight into a policy job. … When I realized this was really going to happen, … I found the prospect pretty scary because I had spent virtually all of my journalistic career. … studying the policy process and diplomacy, and I knew enough about it to know it was very difficult … The actual … transition was a pleasant surprise. … I found that … journalism trains you to be on the lookout for situations and their complexity — what makes things tick, how systems work — to ask the right questions, to inform yourself in a fairly short period of time about complex situations, and also to express yourself.
QThere’s a delicate balance between professional and personal in the book.
A I didn’t want it to be dry and academic and impersonal. … [But] I felt that [to be] too personal would be both ostentatious and distracting. I didn’t want it to be an ego trip, but I did want to have enough personal stuff in there so that I was reminding the reader that I was an example of an important thing about history: History is what we collectively remember and the interpretation that we collectively put on the past, but “we” is made up of lots of “I’s.” One of the things that affects our interpretation of history is family lore and our sense of where we come from. That’s how I was able to get my grandfather and great-uncle and father and mother and even my granddaughter into it.
QWhat stands out as the greatest experience from your years with the Clinton administration?
AI had a lot of fabulous experiences, enriching and exhilarating and tough. There’s no question that, for me, the highpoint of those eight years was working with the Russian former prime minister and the president of Finland in bringing the Kosovo war to an end in a way that involved the Russians in the diplomacy … and stopped seventy-eight days of bombing. Everybody’s writing and talking these days about whether it’s OK for grown-ups to have their eyes well up with tears. Mine did and still do when I remember particularly going into NATO headquarters in Brussels and giving the news to the secretary general of NATO that … the war was over. It was a big moment.
