Nearly two decades after George H. W. Bush left office, his historical reputation is looking pretty good. During the early 1990s, Bush's affinity for “prudence” was the butt of jokes by wiseacres like Dana Carvey; after the misadventures of his son's administration, prudence no longer sounds like such a bad quality in a President. Indeed, the elder Bush compiled a fairly impressive diplomatic record during his four years in office: negotiating the reunification of Germany, helping to ease the end of the Soviet domination of Eastern Europe, presiding over the collapse of the Soviet Union itself, prosecuting a victorious if unsatisfying war in the Persian Gulf, negotiating the North American Free Trade Agreement, and other exploits. Bush might have done better in dealing with hot spots like Haiti and Yugoslavia, certainly, or in outlining a more coherent vision of post-Cold War foreign policy, but on the whole his presidency was one of consistent diplomatic competence.

Christopher Maynard, a historian at the University of North Alabama, undertakes in this book to assess one aspect of this legacy: Bush's dealings with the Soviet Union between 1989 and 1991. Maynard frames his study by pointing out that the Cold War did not end with the fall of the Berlin Wall. With Germany still divided and Soviet troops still in Eastern Europe, he argues, key geopolitical aspects of the superpower competition were still very much alive.

Maynard subsequently chronicles the Bush administration's efforts to confront these issues and, more broadly, to bring the Cold War to a peaceful conclusion. Using records from the Bush presidential library as well as a handful of interviews with Bush and his advisers, Maynard traces the President's crisis-driven diplomacy in his first three years in office. He recounts the “pause” in US–Soviet relations in early 1989 and the generally underwhelming appearance of Bush's initial moves, the fall of the Berlin Wall and the Malta summit, German reunification and the Gulf War, and the unraveling and collapse of the Soviet Union. Overall, he argues, Bush deserves more credit than he has traditionally received for navigating these various crises and ensuring that the end of the Soviet empire was a relatively nonviolent one. “Both Reagan's grand symbolic gestures and Bush's foreign policy expertise were needed to end the Cold War,” he contends (xi, original emphasis).

Indeed, the picture that emerges from Maynard's narrative is that of an administration that acted pragmatically, carefully, and effectively in dealing with a series of rapidly unfolding challenges. Bush successfully reformed the dysfunctional National Security Council he had inherited from the Reagan administration. He won Gorbachev's confidence by refusing to “dance on the Berlin Wall,” and subsequently used that relationship to ease the way toward German reunification, the Soviet withdrawal from Eastern Europe, and other US–Soviet agreements. He held together shaky domestic and international coalitions during the Persian Gulf crisis, and won an unprecedented degree of cooperation from Moscow in doing so. To be sure, Bush fared poorly in other areas – he had no clear strategy for handling the erosion of Gorbachev's political footing in 1991, for instance – but in the main, Maynard's portrait of a skilled diplomat is a convincing one.

The argument of the book is thus sound, but there are aspects of this work that could be better. The quality of the writing is uneven – punchy in some places, plagued by paragraphs that stretch on for two full pages or more in others. Maynard also has a tendency to substitute long quotes from Bush and his advisers for authorial analysis of the administration's accomplishments. More substantively, the selection of documents used from the Bush library is relatively narrow (even when the limits of the declassification process are taken into account), and the chapter on the Gulf War deals with US–Soviet diplomacy only in cursory and rather listless fashion.

On the whole, though, Maynard is undoubtedly correct in making the central point of his book: that while Ronald Reagan has traditionally dominated narratives of the end of the Cold War, it was Bush's diplomatic acumen – and prudence – that helped ensure that this episode came off far more smoothly and peacefully than most observers had thought possible. In light of the more recent course of US diplomacy, this is indeed a record to be envied.