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Using Soviet, East German and U.S. archival materials as well as personal recollections from his service as a U.S. diplomat in Berlin, W.R. Smyser will discuss the Berlin crisis of 1961 and how key individuals, including Kennedy, Khrushchev, and many others contributed to Berlin's pivotal role in Cold War geo-politics. Joining Smyser will be Mary Beth Stein associate professor of German and international affairs at the George Washington University and R. Gerald Livingston, senior visiting research fellow, German Historical Institute.
5th Floor Conference Room
1 October 2009, 3:30-5:00pm
Woodrow Wilson Center
visit www.cwihp.org for more information and to RSVP
W.R. Smyser is Henry Alfred Kissinger Scholar in the John W. Kluge Center at the Library of Congress and professor at the BMW Center for German and European Studies at Georgetown University. Before joining Henry Kissinger's NSC staff, Smyser served in the U.S. armed forces in Germany in the 1950s, under General Lucius Clay in Berlin in the 1960s, and as a political counselor at the American Embassy in Bonn. He is the author of ten books, including most recently Kennedy and the Berlin Wall: A Hell of a Lot Better Than a War .
Mary Beth Stein is associate professor of German and international affairs at the George Washington University. She received her Ph.D. from Indiana University and has received numerous fellowships and scholarships from the Mellon Foundation, Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst, and the Fulbright Foundation. Her current research is connected to a forthcoming book on East German life histories.
R. Gerald Livingston is a senior visiting fellow at the German Historical Institute in Washington. He was previously founding director of the American Institute for Contemporary German Studies at Johns Hopkins University, and before that president of the German Marshall Fund of the United States. For seventeen years in the 1950s through the 1970s he served with the U.S. foreign service in Yugoslavia and Germany, including four years in Berlin following the construction of the Wall.
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