Word: brezhnevs
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...only the first round in a long game of negotiations. Moreover, the Soviets have a tradition of testing new U.S. Presidents. Washington had anticipated a Kremlin rejection of its proposals, but apparently miscalculated the mood and intention of the Russian leaders. Thus Soviet Boss Leonid Brezhnev's almost hostile veto of the U.S. proposals came as a shock. His frosty attitude and Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko's sarcastic comments at a Moscow press conference suggested U.S.-Soviet relations had plunged to the lowest level since the start of detente...
...confrontation that so stunned the U.S. delegation took place on the third day of Vance's visit, in Brezhnev's Kremlin conference room, which once had been Lenin's study. As Vance and the Soviet leader faced each other across a 50-ft.-long table, the mood in the room was so strained that even normally dour Andrei Gromyko tried to lighten the atmosphere with a few lame attempts at humor. TIME Correspondent Christopher Ogden, who had previously reported from Moscow and was back last week covering the Vance trip, was struck by the Soviet leader...
Mythical Menace. Last week, in a major speech before a congress of Soviet trade-union leaders, Brezhnev excoriated Carter's human rights policy in extraordinarily strong terms. Hammering furiously on the lectern, the Russian declared that such "interference in the internal affairs of the Soviet Union," plus a "slanderous campaign" in the U.S. about the "myth" of the Soviet military menace, stood in "direct opposition to further improvement of Soviet-American relations." He attacked "Washington's claim to teach others how to live" when, he said, neither U.S. domestic nor foreign policy can justify moralizing...
Despite his angry words and Khrushchev-like fist pounding, Brezhnev conceded that a new SALT accord, based on the 1974 Vladivostok agreement, was still "quite attainable." If that was achieved, the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. could "move forward to a mutual reduction of armaments." Brezhnev also sketched out a proposal for gradual Israeli withdrawal from occupied Arab territories and hinted that the Russians might be receptive to Carter's proposal to limit the international arms trade...
Carter and his foreign policy advisers, including Russian-speaking National Security Council Chief Zbigniew Brzezinski, dissected the Brezhnev speech line by line. "He's trying to get Vance on the defensive," said one Administration insider. "It's the classic Soviet prenegotiating position: 'What's ours is ours and what's yours is negotiable...