Talks from the Hoover Institution

August 15, 2023 Hoover Institution | Stanford University Join the Hoover Book Club for engaging discussions with leading authors on the hottest policy issues of the day. Hoover scholars explore the latest books that delve into some of the most vexing policy issues facing the United States and the world. Find out what makes these authors tick and how they think we should approach our most difficult challenges. In our latest installment, watch a discussion between Michael Hartney, a Hoover Fellow and Rick Hess, a senior fellow and the director of education policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute on Rick's book The Great School Rethink. ABOUT THE AUTHOR  Rick Hess is a senior fellow and the director of education policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), where he works on K–12 and higher education issues. The author of Education Week’s popular blog “Rick Hess Straight Up,” Dr. Hess is also an executive editor of Education Next, and a Forbes senior contributor. He is the founder and chairman of AEI’s Conservative Education Reform Network.  ABOUT THE BOOK  An invigorating examination of the potential for meaningful change in education, from one of the nation's most astute observers of schooling and school improvement.  In The Great School Rethink, education policy sentinel Rick Hess offers a pithy and perceptive appraisal of American schooling and finds, in the uncertain period following pandemic disruption, an ideal moment to reimagine US education. Now is the time, he asserts, to ask hard questions about how schools use time and talent, how they work with parents, what they do with digital tools, and how they meet the needs of their communities.  As Hess explains, to rethink is to acknowledge the realities of the education system while opening one’s mind to possibility. With characteristic verve and wit, Hess guides readers through his rethink process, a versatile and easily implemented approach to identifying issues and brainstorming possible responses. He encourages readers to explore what improvements might alleviate current pressures and frustrations, such as teacher shortages and burnout, declining student performance, and compromised learning time. Whether their goal is to achieve better student engagement, increase parent involvement, or implement personalized learning, readers will develop the mindset to ask the right questions, to fully understand the problem that’s being solved, and to evaluate the probable effectiveness of proposed solutions.  Brimming with challenging questions, robust exercises, and eye-opening data, this book is a must-read for education professionals, parent advocates, and anyone passionate about the future of American education.

Join the Hoover Book Club for engaging discussions with leading authors on the hottest policy issues of the day. Hoover scholars explore the latest books that delve into some of the most vexing policy issues facing the United States and the world. Find out what makes these authors tick and how they think we should approach our most difficult challenges.  In our latest installment, watch a discussion between Matt Pottinger is a distinguished visiting fellow and Sean Mirski a Visiting Scholar at the Hoover Institution on Sean's book We May Dominate The World: Ambition, Anxiety, And The Rise Of The American Colossus. Thursday, July 27, 2023 | 10:00 am PT / 1:00pm ET  ABOUT THE AUTHOR  Sean A. Mirski is a Visiting Scholar at the Hoover Institution. Mirski is a lawyer and U.S. foreign policy scholar who has worked on national security issues across multiple U.S. presidential administrations. A term member of the Council on Foreign Relations, he currently practices national security, foreign relations, and appellate law at Arnold & Porter Kaye Scholer LLP. He previously served in the U.S. Department of Defense under both Republican and Democratic administrations as Special Counsel to the General Counsel, where he earned the Office of the Secretary of Defense’s Award for Outstanding Achievement. Mirski has written extensively on American history, international relations, law, and politics, including as editor of the book Crux of Asia: China, India, and the Emerging Global Order (CEIP 2013). Earlier in his career, he clerked for two U.S. Supreme Court justices and served as a fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Named one of Forbes magazine’s “30 Under 30,” he graduated magna cum laude from Harvard Law School and holds a master’s degree in international relations from the University of Chicago. ABOUT THE BOOK  What did it take for the United States to become a global superpower? The answer lies in a missing chapter of American foreign policy with stark lessons for today.  The cutthroat world of international politics has always been dominated by great powers. Yet no great power in the modern era has ever managed to achieve the kind of invulnerability that comes from being completely supreme in its own neighborhood. No great power, that is, except one—the United States.   In We May Dominate the World, Sean A. Mirski tells the riveting story of how the United States became a regional hegemon in the century following the Civil War. By turns reluctant and ruthless, Americans squeezed their European rivals out of the hemisphere while landing forces on their neighbors’ soil with dizzying frequency. Mirski reveals the surprising reasons behind this muscular foreign policy in a narrative full of twists, colorful characters, and original accounts of the palace coups and bloody interventions that turned the fledgling republic into a global superpower.   Today, as China makes its own run at regional hegemony and nations like Russia and Iran grow more menacing, Mirski’s fresh look at the rise of the American colossus offers indispensable lessons for how to meet the challenges of our own century.

Join the Hoover Book Club for engaging discussions with leading authors on the hottest policy issues of the day. Hoover scholars explore the latest books that delve into some of the most vexing policy issues facing the United States and the world. Find out what makes these authors tick and how they think we should approach our most difficult challenges.  In our latest installment, watch a discussion between Bill Whalen, the Virginia Hobbs Carpenter Distinguished Policy Fellow in Journalism and David Davenport, research fellow emeritus, and co-author of the recently released Hoover Institution Press book Equality of Opportunity: A Century of Debate on Thursday, June 22, 2023 at 10:00 am PT / 1:00 pm ET. ABOUT THE AUTHOR  David Davenport is a research fellow emeritus at the Hoover Institution specializing in constitutional federalism, civic education, modern American conservatism, and international law. Davenport is the former president of Pepperdine University (1985–2000). Under his leadership, the university experienced significant growth in quality and reputation. He is the cofounder of Common Sense California and the Davenport Institute for Public Engagement and Civic Leadership. He also served on the board of California Forward, a major bipartisan reform group, and was a member of Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger’s California Performance Review Commission. He is a former senior fellow of the Ashbrook Center, where he worked on civic education projects.  With his colleague Gordon Lloyd, Davenport has authored How Public Policy Became War (2019), Rugged Individualism: Dead or Alive? (2017), The New Deal and Modern American Conservatism: A Defining Rivalry (2013); a fourth book, Equality of Opportunity: A Century of Debate, is forthcoming in 2023. These books offer distinctive ways of understanding both historic and current debates between progressives and conservatives in the United States. Davenport is also completing a coauthored book on the civic education crisis. ABOUT THE BOOK  For over one hundred years, Americans have debated what equality of opportunity means and the role of government in ensuring it. Are we born with equality of opportunity, and must we thus preserve our innate legal and political freedoms? Or must it be created through laws and policies that smooth out social or economic inequalities? David Davenport and Gordon Lloyd trace the debate as it has evolved from America’s founding into the twentieth century, when the question took on greater prominence. The authors use original sources and historical reinterpretations to revisit three great debates and their implications for the discussions today. First, they imagine the Founders, especially James Madison, arguing the case against the Progressives, particularly Woodrow Wilson. Next are two conspicuous public dialogues: Herbert Hoover and Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s debate around the latter’s New Deal; and Ronald Reagan’s response to Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society and War on Poverty. The conservative-progressive divide in this discussion has persisted, setting the stage for understanding the differing views about equality of opportunity today. The historical debates offer illuminating background for the question: Where do we go from here?

Stephen Kotkin, a Hoover senior fellow and Professor of History and International Affairs at Princeton University, discusses his new book 'The Siberia Job' with John Kleinheinz. They explore investing in Russia, encountering counterfeit cigarettes, the importance of relationships in business, and analyze Putin's actions and persona.

June 1, 2023 Hoover Institution | Stanford University Join the Hoover Book Club for engaging discussions with leading authors on the hottest policy issues of the day. Hoover scholars explore the latest books that delve into some of the most vexing policy issues facing the United States and the world. Find out what makes these authors tick and how they think we should approach our most difficult challenges.  In our latest installment, watch a discussion between Bill Whalen, the Virginia Hobbs Carpenter Distinguished Policy Fellow in Journalism and Bertrand M. Patenaude, a research fellow and author of the recently released Hoover Institution Press book Bread + Medicine: American Famine Relief in Soviet Russia, 1921–1923 on Thursday, June 1, 2023 at 10:00 am PT/ 1:00pm ET. ABOUT THE AUTHORS Bertrand M. Patenaude is the author of The Big Show in Bololand: The American Relief Expedition to Soviet Russia in the Famine of 1921 (Stanford University Press, 2002). Joan Nabseth Stevenson received her PhD in Slavic Languages and Literatures from Stanford University. She is the author of Deliverance from the Little Big Horn: Doctor Henry Porter and Custer’s Seventh Cavalry. ABOUT THE BOOK  A century ago, the Soviet Union faced a catastrophic famine, brought on by the disruptions of World War I, the Russian Revolution, and the Russian Civil War; draconian Soviet economic policies; and a severe drought. As millions of people faced starvation and hunger-related disease, the Russian writer Maxim Gorky issued an appeal for help, asking “all honest European and American people for prompt aid to the Russian people. Give bread and medicine.” One person was uniquely situated to answer the call: Herbert Hoover, chair of the American Relief Administration (ARA), who had achieved worldwide fame as the organizer and administrator of large-scale humanitarian relief operations during and following World War I. American relief helped millions survive the famine of 1921–23. While the role of food aid has been well documented, Bread + Medicine focuses on the lesser-known story of America’s medical intervention, including a large-scale vaccination drive, and treatment of famine-related diseases such as cholera, typhoid, and typhus and hunger-related deficiency diseases, especially among children. The ARA’s medical relief program proved essential to the overall success of its mission. Bread + Medicine, richly illustrated with photographs, posters, and documents from the Hoover Library & Archives, tells that story in vivid detail.

Looking at Russia in 2023, it is now clear that much has remained unchanged from Soviet times. The biggest change is the elimination of communist central planning, which made Russia’s regime stronger despite the initial turmoil of the 1990s. This paper offers a clue as to why the communist economic management system had to go, and why the KGB’s foreign intelligence and trade cadres, many of them based in Leningrad, came out on top of the refurbished new-old system, and did so with a vengeance. Tomasz’s latest paper explores the roots of the Soviet collapse as it unfolded in the port economy of Leningrad, and the critical lessons that a group of local KGB officers drew from that process. These lessons helped them to recover from the setbacks of 1991 and to eventually take the helm of the Russian Federation in the 2000s. It was the KGB-covered smuggling schemes of late communism that provided the model for the Putin regime to spread its crony ways domestically and corrupt Western institutions abroad. Washington Post reporter Kathryn Belton wrote that “What had begun as corruption within the system became a KGB-cultivated petri dish for the future market economy.” This paper expands this apt metaphor with concrete examples of how that mechanism worked in practice amidst the late communist realities of Leningrad's maritime economy. ABOUT THE SPEAKER Tomasz Blusiewicz is a research fellow at the Hoover Institution. Blusiewicz is a historian of modern Europe and Russia, with emphasis on the intersection of economics, trade, and politics in the Baltic Sea region. He is currently working on his first book manuscript, Return of the Hanseatic League, or How the Baltic Sea Trade Washed Away the Iron Curtain, 1945–1991. In it, he develops a transnational perspective on the Baltic region, from Hamburg in the west to Leningrad in the east, and highlights the role played by Hanseatic port cities such as Rostock, Gdańsk, Kaliningrad, and Riga, all of which served as “windows to the world” linking Communist-controlled Europe with the globalizing world in the Cold War era. Between 2017 and 2022, Blusiewicz worked as a history professor at the University of Tyumen, Russia. He helped to establish the only remaining English-language liberal arts college in Russia, the School of Advanced Studies, in the West Siberian city of Tyumen. There he designed and taught more than ten courses on modern history and international relations until March 2022, when he resigned from his position in protest against the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Blusiewicz also designed, launched, and directed a master’s program in Analytics and Consulting in International Relations. This program was taught in English mostly by US-educated scholars and professionals until it was suspended by the authorities in March 2022.

A Hoover History Working Group Seminar with Jeremy Friedman. In the first decades after World War II, many newly independent Asian and African countries and established Latin American states pursued a socialist development model. Ripe for Revolution traces the socialist experiment over forty years through the experience of five countries: Indonesia, Chile, Tanzania, Angola, and Iran. These states sought paths to socialism without formal adherence to programs that Soviets, East Germans, Cubans, Chinese, and other outsiders tried to promote. Instead, they attempted to forge ahead through trial and error. All five countries would become Cold War battlegrounds and regional models, as new policies in one shaped evolving conceptions of development in another. Lessons from the collapse of democracy in Indonesia were later applied in Chile, just as the challenge of political Islam in Indonesia informed the policies of the left in Iran. Efforts to build agrarian economies in West Africa influenced Tanzania’s approach to socialism, which in turn influenced the trajectory of the Angolan model. Ripe for Revolution shows socialism as more adaptable and pragmatic than often supposed. When we view it through the prism of a Stalinist orthodoxy, we miss its real effects and legacies, both good and bad. To understand how socialism succeeds and fails, and to grasp its evolution and potential horizons, we must do more than read manifestos. We must attend to history. ABOUT THE SPEAKER Jeremy Friedman is the Marvin Bower associate professor of business administration at the Harvard Business School. Previously, he was associate director of the Brady-Johnson Program in Grand Strategy at Yale University. He studies the history of communism, socialism, and revolution over the course of the twentieth century, as revolutionary battlegrounds shifted from the industrialized countries to the developing world in the wake of decolonization. He is the author of Shadow Cold War: The Sino-Soviet Competition for the Third World (2015), and has published in Cold War History and Modern China Studies, as well as The National Interest, The Diplomat, and The Moscow Times.

April 6, 2023 Hoover Institution | Stanford University A Hoover History Working Group Seminar with Sir Paul Tucker. Paul Tucker will be sharing his new book, Global Discord: Values and Power in a Fractured World Order, which considers the geopolitics and legitimacy of the international economic and legal system. The book develops an analysis of the history and future of the international order from the perspective of incentives-values compatibility, that is, the connection between self-enforcing equilibria and history-dependent legitimation principles. Using this framework, the book identifies vulnerabilities and design flaws in today’s international monetary order, trade system, investment order, and international financial system. April 6, 2023 Hoover Institution | Stanford University A Hoover History Working Group Seminar with Sir Paul Tucker. Paul Tucker will be sharing his new book, Global Discord: Values and Power in a Fractured World Order, which considers the geopolitics and legitimacy of the international economic and legal system. The book develops an analysis of the history and future of the international order from the perspective of incentives-values compatibility, that is, the connection between self-enforcing equilibria and history-dependent legitimation principles. Using this framework, the book identifies vulnerabilities and design flaws in today’s international monetary order, trade system, investment order, and international financial system. ABOUT THE SPEAKER Sir Paul Tucker is a Research Fellow of the Mossavar-Rahmani Center for Business and Government at the Harvard Kennedy School. He was formerly the Deputy Governor of the Bank of England, sitting on its monetary policy, financial stability, and prudential policy committees. Internationally, he was a member of the G20 Financial Stability Board, chairing its group on resolving too-big-to-fail groups; and a director of the Bank for International Settlements, chairing its Committee on Payment and Settlement Systems. He was knighted in 2014. He is the author of Unelected Power: The Quest for Legitimacy in Central Banking and the Regulatory State (2018), which charts how the extraordinary power of unelected central bankers and regulators needs to be structured and checked in the interest of democratic legitimacy. His other activities include being a director at Swiss Re, president of the UK’s National Institute for Economic and Social Research, a senior fellow at the Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies at Harvard, a member of the advisory board of the Yale Program on Financial Stability, and a governor of the Ditchley Foundation.

March 27, 2023 Hoover Institution | Stanford University A Hoover History Working Group Seminar with Luke Nichter, Geoff Shepard, and Dwight Chapin. New evidence has surfaced in the fifty years since President Nixon’s resignation. This seminar gathers together three prominent authorities on Watergate, the biggest political scandal of the 20th century. For 50 years, we were taught a carefully curated history of Watergate. It was the nation’s greatest political scandal: a White House-led cover-up, the only resignation of a sitting president, and the conviction of some two dozen members of Richard Nixon’s administration. However, with the opening of new archival material, a fuller history emerges that prompts us to challenge what was previously known. ABOUT THE SPEAKERS Luke A. Nichter is a Professor of History and James H. Cavanaugh Endowed Chair in Presidential Studies at Chapman University. His area of specialty is the Cold War, the modern presidency, and U.S. political and diplomatic history, with a focus on the "long 1960s" from John F. Kennedy through Watergate. He is a noted expert on Richard Nixon's 3,432 hours of secret White House tapes, and a New York Times bestselling author or editor of seven books, the most recent of which is The Last Brahmin: Henry Cabot Lodge Jr. and the Making of the Cold War. Luke’s next book project, under contract with Yale University Press, is tentatively titled The Making of the President, 1968: Lyndon Johnson, Hubert Humphrey, Richard Nixon, George Wallace, and the Election that Changed America, for which he was awarded a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship for 2020-2021. The book draws on interviews with approximately 85 family members and former staffers, in addition to extensive archival research involving first-time access to a number of key collections that will recast our understanding of the 1968 election. Geoff Shepard is an attorney and former official in the Nixon and Ford administrations. He came to Washington in 1969 as a White House Fellow, after graduating from Harvard Law School. He then joined John Ehrlichman’s Domestic Council staff at the Nixon White House, where he served for five years and worked closely with senior officials at the Department of Justice. As a result, he knew and had worked with virtually all of the major Watergate figures. He also worked on President Nixon’s Watergate defense team, where he was principal deputy to the President’s lead lawyer, J. Fred Buzhardt. In that capacity, he helped transcribe the White House tapes, ran the document rooms holding the seized files of H. R. Haldeman, John Ehrlichman and John Dean, and staffed White House counselors Bryce Harlow and Dean Birch on Watergate issues and developments. Over the past decade, Geoff has uncovered internal documents within the Watergate Special Prosecution Force that call into question everything we’ve been told about Watergate. His first book, The Secret Plot to Make Ted Kennedy President (2008), focuses on the political intrigue behind the successful exploitation of the Watergate scandal by Kennedy administration loyalists. His second book, The Real Watergate Scandal, Collusion, Conspiracy and the Plot that Brought Nixon Down (2015), focuses on judicial and prosecutorial abuses in the Watergate prosecutions. His third book, The Nixon Conspiracy, Watergate and the Plot to Remove the President (2021), describes prosecutors’ work with the House Judiciary Committee to bring about Nixon’s impeachment. Dwight Chapin worked as the Personal Aide to former Vice President Richard Nixon during his presidential campaign, becoming Special Assistant to the President after Nixon’s election victory. He became Deputy Assistant to the President in 1971, and visited China three times: with Henry Kissinger in October of 1971, with Alexander Haig in January of 1972, and with President Nixon in February of 1972. Chapin served as “Acting Chief of Protocol” for these trips. Chapin remained in his role as Deputy Assistant until he left the White House Staff in March 1973. Chapin was also President and Publisher of Success Magazine for five years, and later served in Asia as Managing Director of Hill and Knowlton Public Relations. In 1988 Chapin established Chapin enterprises, an independent communications consultancy, which he operated for the next thirty years. Chapin published an in-depth memoirs about his time with Nixon, The President’s Man (2022), which relates his memorable experiences and concludes with new insights about the break-in that brought down Nixon’s presidency.

Join the Hoover Book Club for engaging discussions with leading authors on the hottest policy issues of the day. Hoover scholars explore the latest books that delve into some of the most vexing policy issues facing the United States and the world. Find out what makes these authors tick and how they think we should approach our most difficult challenges.  In our latest installment, watch a discussion between Terry Moe, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and the William Bennett Munro Professor of political science at Stanford University, and Philip K. Howard, author of Not Accountable: Rethinking the Constitutionality of Public Employee Unions on Tuesday, March 28, 2023 at 10:00 am PT/ 1:00pm ET. ABOUT THE AUTHOR  Philip K. Howard. Philip is a leader of government and legal reform in America. He is Chair of Common Good.  In 2002, Philip formed Common Good, a nonpartisan coalition dedicated to simplifying laws so that Americans can use common sense in daily choices. His 2010 TED Talk has been viewed by more than 750,000 people. His 2015 report, “Two Years, Not Ten Years,” exposed the economic and environmental costs of delayed infrastructure approvals, and its proposals have since been incorporated into federal law.   ABOUT THE BOOK  “Elected leaders come and go, but public unions just say no.” Hiding in plain sight is a fatal defect of modern democracy. Public employee unions have a death grip on the operating machinery of government. Schools can’t work, bad cops can’t be fired, and politicians sell their souls for union support. With this searing five-point indictment, Philip K. Howard argues that union controls have disempowered elected executives and should be unconstitutional. Union power in government happened almost by accident in the 1960s, ostensibly to give public unions the same bargaining rights as trade unions. But government bargaining is not about dividing profits, but making political choices about public priorities. Moreover, the political nature of decision-making allowed unions to provide campaign support to friendly officials. Public bargaining became collusive. The unions brag about it: “We elect our own bosses.” Sitting on both sides of the bargaining table has allowed public unions to turn the democratic hierarchy upside down. Elected officials answer to public employees. Basic tools of good government have been eliminated. There’s no accountability, detailed union entitlements make government largely unmanageable and unaffordable, and public policies are driven by what is good for public employees, not what is good for the public. Public unions keep it that way by brute political force—harnessing the huge cohort of public employees into a political force dedicated to preventing the reform of government. The solution, Howard argues, is not political but constitutional. America’s republican form of government requires an executive branch that is empowered to implement public policies, not one shackled to union controls. Public employees have a fiduciary duty to serve the public and should not be allowed to organize politically to harm the public. This short book could unlock a door to fixing a broken democracy.