Word: brezhnevs
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...there? That is the question that continues to intrigue Presidents. Are these Soviets really heartless or are they so intimidated by the system that they cannot act human? Richard Nixon and his Secretary of State Henry Kissinger believed they had found at least an auricle of Leonid Brezhnev, and detente followed. Jimmy Carter, who hand-penned some notes to Brezhnev, even thought the replies were special-until the Soviets invaded Afghanistan...
Presidents cannot give up. Reagan, while recovering from his gunshot wound, wrote out six or seven pages to Brezhnev with his feelings about making the world better for the plain people of both countries. The President showed his draft to the bureaucrats, who translated it into incomprehensible language. Reagan rejected the rewrite and sent his version instead. Back came the boiler plate...
...Brezhnev's failing health was believed to be one reason for the sterile response to Reagan's first Kremlin missive. The exhaustive analysis of each phrase and word that the national-security experts made of Yuri Andropov's replies gave hope there was a personal heartbeat coming through. But when doctors hooked him up to the kidney-dialysis machine, they must have plugged in his pen too. His later responses seemed drained of life. The latest letter Reagan sent to Chernenko met with such a canned response that Reagan brought it up publicly two weeks...
...consensus among Western experts today is that although Chernenko quickly collected all the titles that Brezhnev and Andropov held (General Secretary of the Communist Party and President, as well as Chairman of the Defense Council), he in fact merely shares power with Defense Minister Dmitri Ustinov and Foreign Minister Gromyko. It is the latter who, after more than a quarter-century as the executor of other men's policies, is thought to have been most instrumental in shaping the current hard line. There seems to be no one powerful enough to rein him in. Adam Ulam, director of Harvard...
...SALT: Strategic Arms Limitation Talks, negotiations that began early in the "Nixon Administration, producing the 1972 SALT I treaty limiting ABMs and an interim agreement restricting offensive weapons, and ended with the 1979 SALT II treaty, signed by Jimmy Carter and Leonid Brezhnev but never ratified by the U.S. Senate...