Word: byrds
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Byrd instructs the Soviets
...strongly denied that he had come to the Soviet Union to give the Kremlin a U.S. civics lesson, but that is exactly what West Virginia's Robert Byrd did last week. During a five-day visit to the U.S.S.R., the Senate majority leader repeatedly stressed to his hosts that the Senate is determined, as set forth in the U.S. Constitution, to play its own independent role in SALT...
Speaking to a group of Soviet officials, Byrd cautioned that Moscow would "not contribute to a constructive discussion of the treaty" by expecting the Senate to be the White House's rubber stamp. Byrd was presumably alluding to Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko's statement that it would be the "end of negotiations" if the Senate amended SALT II. Byrd also advised the Soviets not to be offended by the rhetoric that will be sounded during the SALT debate. Said he: "The conscientious application of our constitutional process [should not be viewed] as a challenge to the Soviet...
...Byrd missed few opportunities to stress that as a Senator he is not tied to the White House. Thus, even though State Department experts had accompanied him from Washington, he pointedly took none of them and no members of the U.S. Embassy with him for his 1-hr, and 45-min. meeting with Soviet Communist Party Chief Leonid Brezhnev. Administration officials were similarly excluded from Byrd's more-than-two-hour talk with Gromyko. This session began on an amiable note, with the Foreign Minister observing that his pile of briefing notes was thinner than Byrd's thick...
...Kremlin is well aware of Byrd's key role in this fall's treaty debate and agreed to a private meeting between him and Brezhnev, who is vacationing in the Crimea. Byrd is expected to tell the Soviet leader that any further pronouncements like Gromyko's will only harden resistance to the treaty in the Senate. Brezhnev is likely to signal his understanding that it might be better to ease off until the Senate acts. But Western diplomats warned that if Byrd intends to lobby the Soviet leader for amendments that might make the treaty more acceptable...