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went to the American Committee on U.S.-Soviet Relations as its President.
Q: Okay, today is the 30 th of December, 2003. Bill, you were working with?
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MILLER: The American Committee on U.S.-Soviet Relations.
Q: And you were doing that from when to when?
MILLER: I was President from 1986 until 1992, when I knew I was going to Ukraine as
ambassador.
Q: Okay. That's an interesting thing. For one thing, the committee had to – well, it didn't
have to change its name, did it?
MILLER: It did change its name, and as with many other organizations, university
programs that had to do with the Soviet Union, they had to find some new way of
describing what had been the largest country in the world. The American Committee on
U.S.-Soviet Relations Board had a great debate on whether they should include all the
countries of the former Soviet Union, or just some, or one. And George Kennan said,
"The big one is Russia. It should become the American Committee on U.S.-Russian
Relations. And that's what happened, even though the rubric was broad enough to include
the relations that Russia had with other former states of the Soviet Union.
The State Department, you'll recall, had great trouble figuring out what it was going to be
called and where it would be placed, whether it would be a power unto itself or subsumed
under Europe.
Q: Something like that, divvying up at the State Department, probably took as much
diplomacy as the Congress of Vienna or something like that, more power plays than one
can imagine.
MILLER: Well, those were real stakes for bureaucrats.
Q: Well, anyway, back in '86, when you went there, how did you see at that time the
purpose of this committee?
MILLER: I had gone to the Soviet Union on a trip in 1982 with Lugar and Biden.
Q: These are two senators.
MILLER: From the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and Bill Cohen, who was then
a member of the House. This was a marvelous exploratory trip in which we met a lot of
the new leadership coming into power. In Moscow itself, we really had a good look at the
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