Gorbachev And The Hoover Institution

>> Condoleezza Rice: The Hoover Institution has long been a destination for some of history's most important figures, those who chose to come here and visit and to be a part of Hoover's history.

>> Condoleezza Rice: I had the great fortune to be the young soviet specialist in the White House of George HW Bush from 1989 to 1991.

And it was an earthquake in international politics, and it wouldn't be very long until the Soviet Union was going to collapse. Mikhail Gorbachev, the president of the Soviet Union, had been in Washington, DC for a summit with President Bush, and suddenly I learned that he was going to come to Stanford.

I, of course, had been a faculty member at Stanford for a number of years. I actually had the opportunity to bring Gorbachev to Stanford. When we arrived on campus, you could feel the buzz, because Gorbachev was a huge international rock star really, somebody who was changing the course of history.

And so, for the campus, it was a fantastic moment.

>> Condoleezza Rice: We were in Memorial Auditorium, and the place was just packed. You could already hear the tremendous buzz of the crowd, students and faculty, and members of the Stanford community just waiting to welcome this great historic figure. And so it was electric.

When Gorbachev walked onto the stage. The place went absolutely wild. One has a sense that he really was relishing this moment to be received so warmly by an American crowd. He was very excited. The crowd was very excited. Gorbachev's speech had been well received.

>> Condoleezza Rice: There had been wild applause and a standing ovation when he finished.

I was actually sitting on stage as the White House representative at that moment. As things settled down, former Secretary of State George Shultz said to him, we have a little gift for you. And it was this poster, which is a phrase from Pushkin, about Long Live The Son.

>> George Shultz: On behalf of the Stanford community, President Kennedy and I present this poster to you to be repatriated from the Hoover Institution archives to the Soviet Union with our respect and pleasure at having you here with us today.

>> Condoleezza Rice: And so now just take a moment to think about this.

You have a poster that ends up in the collection of the Hoover Institution on war, revolution and peace, which decidedly has an anti-soviet kind of cast to it. And you have the current president of the Soviet Union receiving that poster as a gift from the former secretary of state of the United States.

Gorbachev was a really quite sentimental man, I got to know that about him. He thought deeply about things, he felt deeply about them. And I'm not surprised that he had tears in his eyes. It maybe meant that Gorbachev, had finally achieved some kind of important reconciliation. The terribly dark 70 years had really passed.

>> Condoleezza Rice: Hoover's archives are filled with the papers and the artifacts of people who wanted to make sure that they would be preserved for history, even if circumstances back at home didn't permit that to happen. And so when Gorbachev visited again in 1992 and went to the exhibition, and looked at the posters and the artifacts, I was very glad that he knew, too, that we were preserving some of the history that he had helped create.

We're a kind of destination point that brings these great world leaders, people like Gorbachev, to Hoover and to Stanford University. It's great that Hoover is able to be a place that these leaders want to be and that we've been able to welcome them.