Letters To The Next President
Senator Lugar (R-Ind.) is a member of the Foreign Relations Committee and served as its chairman in 1985 and 1986. His sensible and clearly written book is simultaneously an indirect criticism of President Reagan and a call for close cooperation between president and Congress in the future conduct of foreign policy. His advice, in a capsule, is: tell the truth, respect the Constitution, work with Congress, and recruit able people as advisers. Substantive chapters on the senator's own role in the restoration of democracy in Guatemala and the Philippines are important additions to the historical record.
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Those who serve in government, especially when under attack, are likely to be conscious--somewhat defensively perhaps--of the spirit of the old Spanish proverb: "It is not the same to talk of bulls, as to be in the bullring." The memory of that sentiment has had some bearing on my observations from the safe distance of private life. It has commended a focus on institutional problems--those that transcend partisanship.
On a long hot day last June and then three straight days in early July, American foreign policy clicked into a new phase whose implications the nation is only beginning to explore. In rapid succession, the House of Representatives, dominated by the Democrats and until then an off-and-on check on the bent of a Republican President and Senate, took four signal votes.
The summer of 1987 was unusually hot. To the Reagan White House it must have also seemed unusually long, for the Administration's basic competence in the conduct of foreign policy was on public trial, day after day, on national television.

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