Word: brezhnevs
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Even the site of this weekend's summit is dictated by the fragility of Brezhnev's health. In 1974 Richard Nixon had traveled to Moscow and Gerald Ford to Vladivostok, so protocol required that this time the U.S. play host to the Soviet leader. But Brezhnev's doctors did not want to subject him to the rigors of a transatlantic flight. The agenda for the Vienna summit has been kept as flexible as possible to allow Brezhnev maximum time for naps and ministrations by the physicians in his entourage...
...Brezhnev has good days and bad days. In April he was barely able to conduct his side of the conversation with visiting French President Valery Giscard d'Estaing, while last month he seemed to have bounced back somewhat to receive Yugoslavia's Josip Broz Tito, who is 14 years older than Brezhnev but markedly more vigorous. Two weeks ago, when Brezhnev journeyed to Budapest for a perfunctory meeting with Hungarian Boss Jāanos Kádár, the local press and diplomatic corps were not so much interested in what Brezhnev said as the difficulty with...
...both the Soviet and American summiteers hope, Brezhnev has a series of good days this weekend, he and Carter might conduct negotiations that would be-in fact as well as in the parlance of the communiquės-frank, businesslike and useful. But if, as both sides fear, Brezhnev has a relapse, the meeting could be little more than an anticlimactic signing ceremony, tediously stretched out over four days. It would also be a lost, probably last opportunity for these two men, who are meeting for the first time, to thresh out some of their differences in a period...
...have retired because of age: Anastas Mikoyan and Nikolai Shvernik. Numerous others-including the dynamic opportunist Alexander Shelepin, the Ukrainian strongman Pyotr Shelest and the moderate reformer Gennady Voronov-have been expelled from the Politburo and denounced for political sins. If there were more precedent for honorable retirement, Leonid Brezhnev might have decided, on one of his bad days, to step down long before...
...Brezhnev's comrades on the Politburo probably want him to hang on as long as possible. Theirs is a truly collective leadership. All important decisions are made by consensus. That certainly includes any decision about which of them should be first among equals. While a retouched newspaper photograph here or a discordant note in a speech there may hint at squabbles and realignments, and while Brezhnev's possible heir, Andrei Kirilenko, may seem to be up one week and down the next, there is little doubt that whoever eventually succeeds Brezhnev will be a Brezhnevite, drawn from...