Podium: Strobe Talbott - Shaping the Crooked Timber of Humanity ; from a Lecture on Sir Isaiah Berlin by the US Deputy Secretary of State, Delivered at All Souls College, Oxford

I MET Isaiah Berlin 32 years ago, during my first visit to Oxford. It was in the summer of 1968. I was working as a summer intern in the London bureau of Time magazine. Just before midnight on 21 August, Soviet tanks overran Czechoslovakia and crushed the Prague Spring. The Time bureau chief sent me out to Wolfson College to interview Berlin on what it all meant. I remember the conversation clearly. He talked, at great speed but with great clarity, about how the invasion proved the weakness of a regime that relied so utterly on brute strength, and how it revealed - I remember to this day the word he used - the "decrepitude" of the Soviet system and of its ideology. …

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Publication information: Article title: Podium: Strobe Talbott - Shaping the Crooked Timber of Humanity ; from a Lecture on Sir Isaiah Berlin by the US Deputy Secretary of State, Delivered at All Souls College, Oxford. Contributors: Not available. Newspaper title: The Independent (London, England). Publication date: January 24, 2000. Page number: 4. © 2009 The Independent - London. Provided by ProQuest LLC. All Rights Reserved.

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