When this book was first published in 1989, the world was a different place. George Bush came into office and there was still a Soviet Union, there was still a Warsaw Pact, a Berlin wall, a Yugoslavia. Nelson Mandela was in jail and the idea that Arafat and Rabin would be shaking hands no a sunny fall day in the Rose Garden beside the smiling face of a forty -eight year-old former governor of Arkansas would have been unthinkable, a chimera. I remember reading a letter from a former student of mine in early December of '89, then working on the Eastern  European desk with the CIA. He wrote to tell me what had happened in Czechoslovakia, in Poland, in Hungary, and in East Germany could never happen in Romania, at least not for five years or so. Well, less than three weeks later the Ceausescau government collapsed.