Word: dobrynins
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...Dobrynin, 66, now headed for the top ranks of Moscow's ruling elite, was both the front and back door of superpower confrontations. As dean of the diplomatic corps, he stood shoulder to shoulder with U.S. Presidents to greet visiting heads of state at the White House. As Henry Kissinger's intimate, he sat time and time again by a crackling fire in the White House Map Room, where Franklin Roosevelt planned World War II, to worry through Soviet-U.S. frictions. He was, in Kissinger's view, the best barometer of the Kremlin's mood. His soundings of American...
...Dobrynin understood the American idiom and psychology, unlike most ambassadors. In the U.S., he was a hale fellow with a ready stock of one- liners and an indestructible alimentary canal. In Moscow or summiteering with his bosses, he faded into the background and became another cold-eyed lackey who, as he once did, jumped up and down like a kangaroo to open and close windows to accommodate Brezhnev's delicate health...
Along with his boss Andrei Gromyko, Dobrynin looked Kennedy in the eye and denied there were missiles in Cuba. Did he lie? Probably. But he was forgiven because his untruth was within the bounds of diplomatic duplicity. He negotiated enthusiastically for an arms summit with Lyndon Johnson. The night before announcement of the summit, Dobrynin rushed to tell the President that Soviet troops were moving into Czechoslovakia. End of summit. Another deception? Of course, but again he charmed his way back to credibility...
...Dobrynin chomped Tom's Mom's chocolate-chunk cookies at Reagan's dinner table, then jetted off to Moscow to warn his superiors about the gunslinger. At congressional prayer breakfasts, where devout Americans roared and heaved, he was the pious atheist. He negotiated the new Soviet embassy on Washington's highest and best land, while the new American embassy in Moscow ended up in a sump...
...Dobrynin has been in every classy parlor in Georgetown. He probably knows as many key Cabinet officers, committee chairmen, bankers, industrialists, journalists and other assorted U.S. power brokers as anyone in the city. Dobrynin has soared across the nation in the private jets of capitalists, put down a buck or two at the Kentucky Derby, poked around the Alaskan pipeline, biked in blue jeans with his granddaughter, and assaulted a Big Mac with a gusto rivaling that of the Chicago Bears' William ("the Refrigerator") Perry...