Meanwhile, I found myself increasingly impressed with Alexander’s expanding professional horizons. I began to realize how much the changes taking place in the late Soviet and early post-Soviet period liberated his mind and his writing. Around this time, I stumbled across a copy of his first book published in 1956 – Struggle for Partition of China and the American Open Door Doctrine – at a bookstall in New York’s Union Square. The Alexander Fursenko who wrote that book had no visible connection to the lively intellect and assiduous archival research habits of the Alexander Fursenko whom I was coming to know. Such contrast raised so many different questions in my mind that I never felt fully comfortable asking. Did Alexander transform himself as he saw new research opportunities? Or, was the Alexander whom I knew always lurking within the author of Struggle for Partition? His magisterial 1967 Dynasty of the Rockefellers suggested the second but, as with so many enigmas of Soviet life, no one probably knew, least of all Alexander himself.

As Alexander’s administrative responsibilities grew I admired his prodigious efforts to secure a sound future for Academy institutions, especially in St. Petersburg. He assumed these obligations at what was probably the most difficult moment in recent history and he deeply cared about protecting all whom he could protect. Simultaneously, he took every opportunity to steal away to the archives and make up for lost time in repositories that once had been closed to him. Alexander was a man on fire with new possibilities; with far greater energy than I had even though I was decades younger. Watching Alexander taught me a great deal about what it means to be responsible for an institution and for the human beings whose fates are linked to it; and about what it means to be a dedicated scholar. If, during the 1980s, Alexander was something of an interesting-though-detached Soviet colleague, by the 1990s he had become a role model.

Around this time I had gotten to know a young historian of the Cold War then working at the University of Hawaii, Manoa, Timothy Naftali. Tim, a Canadian-American, would move to the University of Virginia, eventually directing the Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum, and presently serving as the Director of the Tamiment Library and Robert F. Wagner Archives at New York University. Trained at Yale, Johns Hopkins, and Harvard, Tim had impeccable academic credentials. For me, however, he was more interesting for his time in his native Montreal where he once worked as an aide to one of the very few politicians I have ever admired as human being, Quebec Premier Robert Bourassa. Bourassa served during some of Quebec’s and Canada’s darkest days – including the infamous October Crisis of 1970 – and, as I would later discover when I encountered him while he was teaching in Washington, always retained a rare humanity. Tim very much shared the core values that I appreciated in Bourassa.

Tim had begun working on a volume about the Cuban Missile Crisis and had earned a grant to work at the Kennan Institute in early 1996. By the time Tim arrived at the Institute he had begun collaborating with Alexander on what would become their 1997 classic co-authored work “On Hell of a Gamble”: Khrushchev, Castro and Kennedy, 1958–1964; which was followed in 2006 by their Khrushchev’s Cold War: The Inside Story of an American Adversary. No such successful outcome was assured at the project’s beginning. Tim and Alexander had different temperaments, had emerged from different intellectual traditions, had different initial assumptions about what the crisis was really about, and had collected archival documents which often directly contradicted on another.