Word: brandts
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...most ebullient display of pressing the flesh since the days of Lyndon Johnson's breathless world tours At various times on Leonid Brezhnev's historic four-day visit to Bonn, television cameras caught the Soviet party chief kissing the hand of Chancellor Willy Brandt's wife Rut, bear-hugging the minister-president of North Rhine Westphalia, Heinz Kiihn, and talking to Brandt's diminutive foreign policy adviser Egon Bahr with both hands on his shoulders. Brezhnev grinned and waved at crowds so relentlessly, in fact, that his grandstanding seemed to nettle Brandt-no mean crowd pleaser...
...said: "The political barometer in Europe today points more and more plainly to clear weather." At the airport, he added: "We can say that a good foundation has been created. Now it is important to build on this foundation a stable edifice of good neighborly relations." Said Brandt: "A sorrowful history has made it difficult for us to get together, but we have dared to make a new beginning ... we shall continue our dialogue of peaceful cooperation...
...leaders themselves were concerned, all the auguries seemed positive. In a pair of auspiciously timed interviews (Brezhnev with Stern, Brandt with Izvestia), both men radiated optimism. "I am coming with great interest and good will," Brezhnev told the German editors last week. "I am of the opinion that the Moscow Treaty has created an adequate foundation for the all-round development of relations...
Chancellor Brandt stressed the opportunity for more "human" contacts: "I am not just thinking of agreements between countries. What seems just as important to me are contacts between people ... young people, parliamentarians, scientists, artists, people from economic life and labor...
Despite the warmth of Brezhnev's meeting with Brandt, the armies of East and West still face each other in Central Europe. On that front, thawing the cold war is proving to be much more difficult than freezing it. Last week, after 3½ months of diplomatic delay and more than 70 top-secret meetings, talks to reduce the level of troops in that region finally began in Vienna, but under less than propitious circumstances...