Word: ambassador
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Bosnia absorbed much of the Administration's time, with Powell delivering his "constant, unwelcome message": the U.S. "should not commit military forces until we had a clear political objective.'' In one particularly heated debate, Powell recalls U.N. Ambassador Madeleine Albright asking him in frustration, "What's the point of having this superb military that you're always talking about if we can't use it?'' As Powell relates it, "I thought I would have an aneurysm. American G.I.s were not toy soldiers to be moved around on some sort of global game board...I told Ambassador Albright that...
Later that day, President Bush and Scowcroft spoke with Prince Bandar bin Sultan, the Saudi ambassador to the U.S. and an old racquetball partner of mine. They wanted Bandar to understand the threat his country faced and to know that we were prepared to come to its aid. Afterward, Scowcroft called Cheney. Bandar was coming over, he said, and we were to give him another dose of reality. On his arrival at Cheney's office, Bandar played his usual Americanized, jaunty fighter-pilot role, drinking coffee from a foam cup and stirring it with a gold pen. Ordinarily, we addressed...
...mother an usher in a Moscow theater. He was an aircraft-design engineer in 1944, when Stalin ordered Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov to start recruiting technicians rather than intellectuals and independent thinkers to staff the U.S.S.R.'s postwar diplomatic corps. From such implausible roots, Anatoly Dobrynin rose to become ambassador to the U.S. for five Soviet leaders and interlocutor for six U.S. Presidents--Kennedy to Reagan...
...does not disappoint. His memoir, In Confidence, is a no-pulled-punches page turner of a diplomatic history, spiced with anecdotes and insights. He recounts how Stalin once told his Ambassador to the U.S., Andrei Gromyko, to learn English by listening to sermons in American churches. How Dobrynin, during the 1962 Cuban missile crisis, communicated with Moscow via Western Union, which sent a bicycle messenger to pick up coded cables. How Moscow secretly offered financial aid to Vice President Hubert Humphrey for his 1968 presidential campaign against Richard Nixon (Humphrey declined the offer). How Soviet Party Secretary Leonid Brezhnev...
...made him "an involuntary tool of deceit" by maintaining that they were defensive only. Khrushchev's lack of a fallback plan once the missiles were discovered was a lesson, Dobrynin notes, that was forgotten by his successors when they invaded Afghanistan in 1979. Ignoring warnings from his generals and ambassador, Brezhnev told Dobrynin not to worry: "It'll be over in three to four weeks...