Word: bohlen
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...three decades, perhaps more than any other man, "Chip" (a nickname he picked up at Harvard) Bohlen contributed to the workings of U.S.-Soviet policy. In 1934, he joined the staff of the first U.S. embassy in Moscow. Thirty-four years later he helped draft
Trading Quips. In appearance, Chip Bohlen was almost a Hollywood typecasting of what an American diplomat of the mid-century ought to be -tall, broad-shouldered, his language and his clothes tailored with equally elegant understatement. But Bohlen, who was reared in Aiken, S.C., and Ipswich, Mass., as the son of a modestly wealthy family, was also an engagingly informal man who propped his feet on his desk, spilled pipe tobacco on carpets, and organized late-night poker parties...
When advised that President Kennedy was thinking of sending Bohlen to Paris as the U.S. Ambassador, De Gaulle reportedly remarked, "Well, if it has to be an American, he is probably the best...
During the 1950s Bohlen served four years as U.S. Ambassador to Moscow, reporting on the rise and fall of Premier Georgy Malenkov, the ascendancy of Nikita Khrushchev, the Suez crisis and the Hungarian revolution. Khrushchev apparently loved to trade quips with him. At a diplomatic party, the Russian dictator once remarked to Bohlen that Soviet Defense Minister Marshal Georgy Zhukov was putting away the refreshments "as if he had starved for a week...
...Replied Bohlen: "It must be because you cut his budget." The mood was not always so mellow...