•Shekhar Gupta: Would give us your assessment of Indo-American relations since the 1960s?

I saw India for the first time in 1961. I was a historian at Harvard??, and I wrote about 19th-century Europe, and the problems that occupied me were to see whether I could learn to understand and describe how, after the Napoleonic wars which tore Europe apart, there was 100 years of peace and then how, after that 100 years of peace, Europe tore itself apart again. So I started out writing about the Congress of Vienna which ended the Napoleonic war, and I was going to go on through the 19th century. One day, I was walking through Harvard Yard and ran into Arthur Schlesinger. These were leisurely times, and Arthur Schlesinger had in his pocket a letter from a former Secretary of the Air Force called Tom Finletter that described the doctrine of massive retaliation of nuclear weapons. I did not know more about that subject than any other civilian. I had never studied it. He asked, ‘What do you think?’ I put that letter it my pocket, and I wrote Arthur, telling him why I thought you couldn't conduct a strategy depending on mutual extermination. Without my knowing it, he sent that letter to the editor of Foreign Affairs. The editor made an article out of it. Because of that article, I was asked to head a study group on nuclear weapons and foreign policy at the Council on Foreign Relations. That book became a bestseller – the only bestseller in the history of the Council on Foreign Relations. I became well known. I never got back to the 19th century in my writings.

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